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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/22824196">Sea Change</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/izarie/pseuds/izarie'>izarie</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Hannibal (TV)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>And then Will gets Convinced to go on a Cannibalism Spree, As in It’s Saturated with Metaphors, Blatantly Obvious Hannigram, Character Transformation, Hannibal and Will are Very Much in Love, Hunting, I Also Love Bedelia, I have a problem, Intimacy in Terms of Murder, Light Angst, M/M, Murder Husbands, Not for Animals but for People, Poetic, Post-Episode: s03e13 The Wrath of the Lamb, Post-Fall (Hannibal), Very Mild Gore, Violence, Vulnerable Will, not beta read we die like men</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-02-21</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-07-02</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-04-28 12:35:10</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Teen And Up Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>8</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>25,160</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/22824196</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/izarie/pseuds/izarie</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>Honor and righteousness were the first to be stripped away. Empathy followed soon after, the well of his imagination emptied temporarily, no water to quench the thirst of his mind. Now, Will Graham is lost in the aftermath of the fall, struggling to come to terms with the hole once filled by his morality—and what has come to take its place.<br/><br/>In a world in which he has been reborn as a killer, Will’s metamorphosis becomes a part of something greater than himself. So far, the power of two men—two monsters—has yet to make itself known to the world. But perhaps this time the beast bound within him will break its chains at last; perhaps, after years of striving to release this very element of him, it will be the thing that finally satisfies Hannibal Lecter’s appetite.<br/><br/>They have seen and felt the wrath of the lamb, and they have gloried in it.<br/><br/>Now it is time to witness the transformation.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Will Graham &amp; Hannibal Lecter, Will Graham/Hannibal Lecter</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>50</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>125</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>1. Chapter 1</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>This is my first fic, so please don’t judge too hard! I finished the third season of Hannibal and basically died because no one I know had watched it, so I started writing this. I guess the purpose of this entire thing is to bridge the last scene with Will and Hannibal and the one with Bedelia in the end credits. The story will end once I get there (though we don’t really know how long that will take), and hopefully by then I’ll have finally gotten some closure on these characters that seem dead-set on ruining my life. Enjoy!</p></blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>
  <span>It began with an embrace.</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>An imbalance.</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>A slow slip into the dark.</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>The night rose up to swallow them whole.</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>It was an ugly, ungraceful thing. The wind whipped at his skin, a thousand blades cutting deep as they fell. Fire burned in his lungs and engulfed his heart, even as the cold tore through his body like a knife, drowning his thoughts, drowning his mind, drowning his </span>
  <em>
    <span>everything. </span>
  </em>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>The void was an unforgivable entity.</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>He could feel himself being ripped from the arms that held him. He could feel himself begin to drift, except it wasn’t drifting, it was plummeting, the entire eternity it took to hit the water collapsing into a single second. One second of slow time, the next few sped up as if God himself was manipulating the strings of the universe, a pause before he hit the waves, and then—</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>The world splintered into a thousand different pieces.</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>A scream forced its way through his lips as he broke the surface of the ocean. If the wind had been freezing, it was nothing compared to this—the cold invaded his body, flooded his veins, coursed through him with enough insidious enthusiasm that he </span>
  <em>
    <span>burned. </span>
  </em>
  <span>The pain was supreme, rendering his nerves a conflagration of ice—there was no end to this, oh, </span>
  <em>
    <span>God, </span>
  </em>
  <span>this all-consuming dimension of </span>
  <em>
    <span>agony. </span>
  </em>
  <span>If he hadn’t been blinded by the impact, then he </span>
  <em>
    <span>had </span>
  </em>
  <span>been by the waves, which leapt like arterial sprays and surrounded him in their keen embrace.</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>He couldn’t see anything, much less any</span>
  <em>
    <span>one</span>
  </em>
  <span>; his useless fingers clawed at the sea, trying to pull himself through, to find him, to find </span>
  <em>
    <span>Hannibal</span>
  </em>
  <span>, the devil torn from him by the fall. And if Will couldn’t reach him, then he searched blindly for sand, for shore, for solid ground beneath his feet before the ocean’s fury rent him apart piece by piece.</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>He could sink. He could sink, right here, right now, and no one would find him. No one would know. He could die here with himself, alone, no legacy—unless Hannibal survived, of course. But was that not the point of the fall? To ensure two clear paths, one in which Will lived and one in which he didn’t?</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>He gasped, lungs filling with water as his hands met something solid. Solid, and moving against him; Will’s fingers dug into Hannibal’s shoulders as they began to swim in earnest, shaking, pulling through the thick, churning jelly of the water’s resistance. There was no direction to move but forward, nothing to do but pray they would reach land soon. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>It was another eternity before Will’s fingers found a rocky shore, and they collapsed onto it. The sea licked at their heels, reluctant to release them, and the salt and the cold set a relentless throb in his wounds, but he was alive. </span>
  <em>
    <span>They </span>
  </em>
  <span>were alive. This was the path fate had chosen for him.</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>Beside him, he thought he heard the whisper of his name. When he reached toward the source of the sound, though, all his hands met was a mass of swirling darkness. He curled up against it, wrapping ribbons of shadow around his fingers, needing to get closer, craving warmth. His eyelids were too heavy, burdened by the thickness of the night. The darkness closed in on him, then, and he found himself relaxing against it, offering up himself in all of his vulnerability.</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>Will let himself sink beneath the weight of the sky. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>———</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>He came to slowly, quietly, </span>
  <span>woke to the low whisper of a voice that he thought he’d only ever hear again in death or fevered dreams. The words tumbled over themselves, softening and drawing together and coalescing into a single syllable: </span>
  <em>
    <span>“Will.</span>
  </em>
  <span>”</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>The world blurred into focus.</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>He was not lying on the shore of the Atlantic, being worn away by the tide. Here, the ground molded to his tired limbs, and there was something soft resting against his head. Will blinked, looking down at the blanket spread over his legs. </span>
  <em>
    <span>Where are we?</span>
  </em>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>He glanced up, meeting eyes that had become as familiar to him as his own. Hannibal sat leaning against the couch in front of him, a hand pressed to his side where the bullet wound had been bandaged. Will tried to open his mouth and felt as if one side of his face had been fit into plaster; he reached up to feel bandages and what were probably stitches in his cheek, where he had been stabbed by Dolarhyde.</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <em>
    <span>What happened? </span>
  </em>
  <span>he tried to ask, but his throat constricted around the question and all that came out was, “Water.” Hannibal reached toward a side table and drew a cup toward him. He downed the whole thing in one go, the liquid a soothing balm.</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>“What did you do to me?” he said when he felt steady enough to speak, his mouth shaping and reshaping syllables around the wound in his cheek. He reached back and brushed the bandages at his shoulder with trembling fingers. His vision swam slightly when he shook his head, his mind a drugged haze.</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>“A bit of morphine to dull the pain,” Hannibal said, inclining his head toward the syringe that laid on the side table. </span>
  <em>
    <span>And so you don’t get away.</span>
  </em>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>It was impossible to believe that Hannibal had dragged them both out of the water, up to the house, and had still maintained a clear enough mind to bandage them both and administer a careful dosage of the drug. “You’re not alone,” Will said.</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>“I wasn’t.” Hannibal cut his gaze toward the dining room, the hall of broken glass. “I asked her to leave on your behalf.”</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>Will stared at Hannibal, half of his face dressed in the shadows cast by the light of the stars. “Chiyoh.”</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>A hint of a smile ghosted the other man’s lips.</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>“And where is she now?” Will asked.</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>“Hunting,” Hannibal said. “For supplies, that is. It seems that I have exhausted all of my materials given the light of our recent circumstances.” He was so </span>
  <em>
    <span>nonchalant </span>
  </em>
  <span>about everything, it was disturbing.</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>With a groan, Will drew himself upright. His shoulder ached, even with the morphine, and his tongue felt thick in his mouth. There was nothing he found he was able to say—well, that wasn’t true, there were a great many things to be said, of course—but the words lodged in his throat and he was unable to spit them out. After a while, he settled for, “You could have left me in the ocean to die.”</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>“And you could have left me,” Hannibal said smoothly, as if he had prepared for this. “Arguably we could have not saved each other and made our way to shore all on our own. But then we would not be here, would we?”</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>Will blinked, his thoughts still swimming. He felt as if he was only hearing half of what Hannibal was saying. “You didn’t have to save me,” he said again. “I tried to kill you. </span>
  <em>
    <span>Again</span>
  </em>
  <span>, mind you.”</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>“Thankfully the Atlantic was merciful to us,” Hannibal said. “Our survival paves the way for gold, new opportunities.”</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>His lips had turned to sandpaper. He heard his voice as if from a distance, ringing with disbelief: “This is gold to you?”</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>“You tried to kill me, Will. We can go nowhere but onward, and I left trepidation in the sea.”</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>“What, you aren’t afraid of what I’ll try to do to you anymore?” Will said. “I could turn you in, you know. Call Jack, and that’ll be the end of it all.”</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>Hannibal closed his eyes, stoic in the moonlight. “Do not pretend that I am unaware of the choice you have made, Will. You tried to justify yourself by throwing us off that cliff. If you died, then no one would have to know the truth. Your history would not be tarnished.”</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>“And if I lived . . .”</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>Hannibal’s smile was a coiled snake. “Because you live, you have to come to terms with the fact that you cannot leave this world knowing you’ve rid it of a devil or two. Your morality still has a grip on you, but now so does the beast.”</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>Will blinked and saw the sea, like the mouth of some unfathomable monster, yawning open to digest them whole. It was his last card to play in his and Hannibal’s cruel, cruel game, where his dignity slipped away from him as easily as time, always twitching out of his grasp the more he tried to hold onto it. It was easier to let go, in the end. With Hannibal it always had been.</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>“You have me,” he said, relinquishing his hand in his final play. “What will you do with me?”</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>Hannibal hesitated, as if he wasn’t sure what to say. Will could see the argument in his eyes: </span>
  <em>
    <span>I do not have you completely, not yet. </span>
  </em>
  <span>And it was true—he didn’t feel free as Hannibal claimed they were, he felt trapped.</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>But he didn’t know if he would ever feel free.</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>“I will see you through your transformation,” Hannibal said after a pause. “You once said you intended to see the Dragon change me. I daresay he’s changed you most of all.”</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>“Don’t pretend you weren’t a part of it,” Will said bitterly. “I don’t feel changed, I feel empty. I look at you and I can’t </span>
  <em>
    <span>see </span>
  </em>
  <span>you. I look at you, and your figure has assumed the form and light of a heavy partial eclipse. Half of you exists always in the dark.” He said it to hurt the other man, perhaps, or to see anything on his face other than faint amusement.</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>Hannibal, as always, didn’t falter, though he dropped the smile. “You can’t come back from this, Will.”</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>His hands curled into fists in his lap. “I wasn’t planning to.” But he was angry. Angry with himself, with Hannibal, angry with God Himself for letting this happen to him. </span>
  <em>
    <span>It hurts, </span>
  </em>
  <span>he wanted to say, </span>
  <em>
    <span>this hurts so much and I don’t know how to stop it, it hurts how good it feels. </span>
  </em>
  <span>Hannibal was right: he couldn’t come back from this, what he’d done. He’d tried, had offered his life to the hands of fate, and in turn it had cast him away from death. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>Fate had always been a ruthless thing.</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>“My objective,” Hannibal said softly, “was never to throw you into a state of self-hatred. I wanted to let you know yourself. To see yourself.”</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <em>
    <span>See. </span>
  </em>
  <span>A lisp, a broken whisper. Eight bullets, a man on the ground with his mouth curved into a seething grin, the holes rent into his body oozing putrid darkness in place of blood.</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <em>
    <span>See. </span>
  </em>
  <span>A girl on the ground, gasping for breath like a fish out of water, crimson splattering from her throat to the pale kitchen floor.</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>“See,” Will repeated, wrestling with the sudden image of Garett Jacob Hobbs that he’d thought he’d long since rid himself of. He felt like a fly caught in a spider’s web, unable to untangle himself from his white cocoon. Suspended, awaiting the predator. His empathy had been his only lifeline in his last life, and now that felt taken away from him too. “I’m so . . . </span>
  <em>
    <span>tired</span>
  </em>
  <span>.” The words tumbled from his lips like a broken confession.</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>With his face turned away from Hannibal, he heard him shift and then rise, a slight catch in his breath the only sign of pain. He moved toward Will and then past him, his footsteps steady and already fading. “Rest, Will,” was what became of their conversation, and then his voice was fading too, steadily, steadily into white noise.</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>Will leaned back on the couch, his thoughts a whirlwind and maelstrom, trying and failing to face the final truth. The honesty of both him and of Hannibal. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>The light of a hero, the golden sun, had made its cycles and deemed him unworthy of its brilliance. Will rolled over to embrace the kindness of sleep; a new era was dawning on both their empty skies, now—it bled into them, flowing like a river into this latest life. He could feel it rushing and ebbing but ultimately </span>
  <em>
    <span>filling </span>
  </em>
  <span>him so completely that all he could hear was the tide, the roaring of rebirth like the ocean. And he could make out the light, too, the spilling of it, red light like stained water across their violent horizons. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>Soon, it was all he could see.</span>
</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>Sea change: a profound or notable transformation.</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0002"><h2>2. Chapter 2</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>Sorry this chapter has so much introspection, I needed a bit of filler to set the mood. I’m taking the story pretty slow since it’s supposed to be about Will’s becoming anyway (and I love my dramatic monologues). Anyway, for now please enjoy Hannibal being <i>wayyyy</i> too in love for his own good and me laughing at having an excuse to write about it.</p></blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>
  <span>He could smell the salt.</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>The air was thick with it, the brine of the sea staining his lips, sealing them with the water’s stinging kiss. There was no one in the house but him and Will and Chiyoh—once she came back, at least—and their scents lingered, blurring together into a heavy fog that settled in all the rooms. Hannibal could pick out the most concentrated of places, where they each spent most of their time. Chiyoh’s was in the kitchen, molding the air to her like a hunting coat, filling it with the redolence of pine wood and winter wind. Will’s was currently amassed on the couch, smelling most—of all things—of the sea.</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>He turned his gaze to Will, who had fallen asleep on the couch with legs draped haphazardly over the armrest. His head was tilted back, curls of hair falling into his eyes. Hannibal had the sudden inexplicable urge to brush them away, to curve his hands along the fine bones that shaped his face—lovingly, of course; he was not going to deny that. But his love was a cold, coiled thing, his affection shaped by perception and insight rather than silver tongues and gentle caresses. Even so, he found Will to be lovely, a sleeping Adonis. He always was when he slept.</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <em>
    <span>My compassion for you is inconvenient. </span>
  </em>
  <span>Words spoken over a glass of wine just a few hours ago, in a room that had not yet been rent to pieces. It was difficult to believe that everything had occurred in just that short amount of time—it felt like a journey to the end of the universe and back again, his and Will’s spirits shaped by the witnessing of thousands of stars come to pass, their dying and their rebirth, those explosions of pain and light. It was a journey of a thousand years taken in a single night, and at the end of it shone a thousand new chances to live.</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>His compassion was inconvenient, but it need not be.</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>He wished for a sketching pad to preserve this moment on paper. He wanted to capture the way Will’s face was upturned to the dim night, the way his eyelashes laid low, so black that Hannibal thought they must leave a charcoal dusting on his cheekbones. He wanted to encapsulate his figure, the graceful arch of his neck, the way the moonlight collected in the curve of his throat. They would need to leave soon in order to escape the authorities—borrowed time this was, soon to run out. This pocket of peace would not last long, but here, now, Hannibal thought, Will seemed eternal.</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>“You are very fond of him,” said a sudden voice behind Hannibal, soft with an undercurrent of steel.</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>He did not move. “He is my friend.”</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>“I know what friendship looks like,” Chiyoh said, coming to sit beside him. Her hair was tied into a low knot, strands of black framing her face, and her eyes were shadowed. “There is more to this.”</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>“</span>
  <em>
    <span>Do</span>
  </em>
  <span> you know it?” Hannibal asked. “How many times have you truly come across it?”</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>“With you,” she said. “You were my friend. But I look at you in a different kind of way than you look at him. I brought you your supplies, Hannibal.”</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>Hannibal turned to face her, taking a roll of gauze and spinning it in his fingers. A bag laid at their feet, presumably filled with more supplies—threads and needles, pressure bandages, nitrile gloves, disinfectants.</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>“My thanks,” he said.</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>Chiyoh’s eyes were still on Will. “I cannot imagine what you see in him. He is foolish. And reckless.”</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>“Strange, is it not?” said Hannibal. “Beauty is such a fickle thing. Any two individuals can look at the same face, the same person, and it will be like looking at watery, distorted reflections. Both versions differ from each other, and common consensus fails when deciding which is superior. In believers, there is no objective truth.”</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>“There is beauty in having your wits about you,” said Chiyoh shortly. “One could say that you are not good for each other.”</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>They were vicious, the way they reveled together. Two halves of the same spirit. “There is no good,” he said. “There only is.”</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>“There is power, and mercy, and control,” Chiyoh said. “You take that away from each other. When we traveled together, you were all he could think of.”</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>Her words gave rise to a warm sort of feeling, blooming like a poisoned flower in his chest. Diluted, spoiling his system. “You can be blind to him,” he said. “You do not need to see, only I do. Souls after death are all the same, with varying degrees of difference in the eyes of those who behold them.” </span>
  <em>
    <span>And he shines brighter than the rest.</span>
  </em>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>“You have died?” Chiyoh asked.</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>“More than once,” Hannibal said. “Every time I begin a new life, a part of me departs with the ways of the old.”</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>“Then you have left me in the past, and you have less and less of yourself to offer each time you start again.”</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>“I pluck pieces of the world around me and make them my own, you need not to worry,” Hannibal said. “And you will always protect me, Chiyoh. It is what you do best.”</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>Her face was unreadable. “What new life is this?”</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>“It is not yet truly a new life. We still stand in the space of transition between it and death. It is life </span>
  <em>
    <span>in </span>
  </em>
  <span>death, I suppose.”</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>“What would take you out of it?” Chiyoh asked.</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>“Will,” Hannibal sighed. “We build our new life from the ashes of our old. Come from dust, return to dust, until we burn again.”</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>“I will acknowledge it,” she said, “when the symmetry shows. When he wakes, if I ever see a flame, I will come to you.”</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>Will stirred idly on the couch, his movements surprisingly fluid. He looked like a picture, then, framed by the elements. Fire and earth and air and water and all that came in between, they revolved around him. Even in sleep, he was able to command them.</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>It was beautiful.</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>Hannibal remained where he was long after Chiyoh left. He would like to be there when Will woke again, to be the first thing he saw when he opened his eyes.</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>There was a rare tenderness on the other man’s face that could only be found in rest. He glowed, silhouetted by the light of the moon. Hannibal smiled.</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <em>
    <span>Will Graham,</span>
  </em>
  <span> he thought, </span>
  <em>
    <span>radiant even in the afterlife.</span>
  </em>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>And there was nothing more dangerous than that.</span>
</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>Uhhh . . . this came out a lot sappier than any of us really needed to be but it exists, so . . . I guess it served its purpose? I don’t know guys I’m trying to write what happens between two scenes and I don’t have a lot to work on<br/><br/>We can all deal with my rambling now though! I’m sure it’s totally fine!!</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0003"><h2>3. Chapter 3</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>So obviously this chapter took way longer to write than I anticipated. I’ve just been struggling with motivation recently and having a lot of trouble writing in this style, so if things are sort of out of character or feel kind of off then I’m really sorry. Please enjoy though!</p></blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Pinpricks of light framed the sky. </p><p> </p><p>White moonlight slit its rays through the waves, cutting through them like arrows of illumination, cleanly, neatly, without effort. Soft light glided over the water, painting iridescence in the shallows; shadows curved in the places the moon was unable to touch, where the countenance of the ocean was cast only by the stars.</p><p> </p><p>Pebbled sand rode up beneath his feet, excited to fire in the day but burned all the way to ash now. It was a cool ash, cool to his heels, cool to his touch. A balm to his stinging skin, gray in the night instead of golden.</p><p> </p><p>The moon was always more tender than the sun.</p><p> </p><p>He walked along the coast, the waves leaping up toward the sky as if they could pull it into the water. It was peaceful here, serene—if he had died here after all he didn’t think he would be angry. The sea was a fine resting place—no bodies to uncover, no messy funerals, only burial by the water. </p><p> </p><p>It was a while before he heard the footsteps at his side, sure and steady.</p><p> </p><p>He turned.</p><p> </p><p>Hannibal’s face was upturned toward the stars, but there was something wrong with it, something that Will could not place. Perhaps it was some sort of flaw in his features, a deformity? But they were clean as ever, neat, effortlessly smooth, defined like moonlight on the water. Perhaps it was his expression that was different, but he could not be certain.</p><p> </p><p>When Hannibal opened his mouth, smoke poured from his lips instead of words.</p><p> </p><p>“Hannibal—,” Will started, but was cut off as thick black tendrils wrapped around his neck, choking him, squeezing him of air and life. He spluttered, hands flying up to his throat, where he could feel his pulse ticking like a broken clock. </p><p> </p><p>It was a strangely intimate position. As darkness began to claim his vision, Will realized what he had found so wrong about the other man’s face—it <em> wasn’t </em> his face, not exactly. It was built of layers, thousands and thousands of carefully curated shifts and expressions, blended together so completely that it was impossible to tell where one ended and the other began. It was a mask over his true self—he was the devil incarnate, after all—and as Will watched, he found that he was able to see through it, through the plastered sympathy and sanity, through all of what made him <em> human. </em>When all of that was stripped away, he was able to lay Hannibal Lecter bare.</p><p> </p><p>The antlers pierced the sky, the tips of them gleaming black as they met the moon. His limbs had lost their form, melting into darkness that roiled within the vague confines of arms and legs. Will’s feet left the ground as the Wendigo tilted its head back and glanced up, tilted its head back to devour the night, to swallow the stars.</p><p> </p><p>He felt himself slipping.</p><p> </p><p>He couldn’t breathe, and then he could, waking with a strangled cry, blood and spit dripping from his mouth where he had ripped the stitches. His fingers came away wet when he reached to touch the wound, and he used it to steady himself, to draw himself to his feet.</p><p> </p><p>Will turned to meet two figures whose outlines blurred together in his vision. They were of different height, different stature, but they were standing in the darkness a few hours before dawn, when the stars disappeared and a pitch blackness overtook the night. He could not make out their faces.</p><p> </p><p>“Hannibal?” he croaked, and cleared his throat, his mouth desert dry. The taller silhouette tilted its head at him and promptly strode over to the couch.</p><p> </p><p>Hannibal reached up to graze his fingers on the side of Will’s cheek. He flinched away, the bit of contact sending a flash of pain up through his head and to his shoulder, which felt as if it were being split by lightning. Hannibal made a noise of disapproval and turned his head to the side. “You ripped your stitches, Will. And the morphine seems to be wearing off.”</p><p> </p><p>Will’s knees gave out; the cushions were there to meet him. He couldn’t speak, but he gestured toward the window, where Chiyoh stood looking out into nothing. Or perhaps she was looking at <em> him </em>.</p><p> </p><p>“I would require some assistance, Chiyoh,” Hannibal said, and she arrived at his side in a cascade of hushed cloth and tender fortitude.</p><p> </p><p>Together, they administered another careful dose of morphine and redid the stitches in Will’s cheek. He felt himself slipping in and out of consciousness, and struggled to stay awake, not wanting to lose himself to the cold, numb grip of sleep. “Chiyoh?” he said at one point, slurring the name.</p><p> </p><p>“I am not here for long,” she said, glancing at Hannibal. “Only a moment of aid. We cannot afford to stay here for more than a day.”</p><p> </p><p>“I called for her after we made it to the house,” Hannibal said. “You collapsed, and I myself was on the verge of it. You seemed to have taken the brunt of our fall to the sea, though I will say it was by no means pleasant for either of us.”</p><p> </p><p><em> How was she able to come so quickly? </em>Will wanted to ask, but did not have the strength to say the words.</p><p> </p><p>As always, Hannibal seemed to be able to read his thoughts. “Chiyoh has watched over me since I asked her to, three years ago.” <em> When I turned myself in for you. </em></p><p> </p><p>Will averted his gaze from him, from the quiet message those words implied.</p><p> </p><p>“Sleep,” Hannibal said, the order a mundane finality. He and Chiyoh stood as if they were a unit, the cogs and wheels that turned a great machine and allowed it to run.</p><p> </p><p>The last thing Will heard was Chiyoh’s soft inquiry, dim as the rising sun. </p><p> </p><p>“Hannibal,” she said, and her voice was already dwindling, his senses waning by the second. “What do you need me to do?”</p><p> </p><p>———</p><p> </p><p>In the few hours proceeding dawn, Will’s health seemed to be improving significantly. Slowly, remarkably, he was able to rise and walk, and it was generally agreed among the three of them that the sooner they could leave this place the better.</p><p> </p><p>Hannibal, too, had slept during the night, and had only woken about an hour before Will had, struggling to rise from the couch. There was much he was able to endure, but the bullet wound he had sustained was proving to be more difficult than he’d previously thought. The constant need to move would slow the healing process further, which meant that they must frequently replenish their supplies and take particular precautions. So far, though, the thread of their survival and their subsequent recoveries had been sewn by the hands of a miracle—a miracle that they sat together now, that the ocean had not taken either of their lives, that they had not died in each other’s arms on the beach or the cold, unforgiving floor of the house.</p><p> </p><p>It was at the table in the shattered dining room that Will finally noticed it. He was looking out, watching the sky bleed pale pink and gold with the rising sun, when he frowned, taking in the emaciated figure on the ground. He blinked, and turned back to Hannibal.</p><p> </p><p>“You didn’t get rid of the body.”</p><p> </p><p>“I was going to ask you what you wanted to do with it.”</p><p> </p><p>Will tilted his head to the side, as if he was listening to someone whisper in his ear. Ever since the fall, he’d been different—even when he wasn’t floating in a haze of fever dreams, he was distant, as if he had lost himself in the music of the afterlife and now could not find his way back. </p><p> </p><p>Hannibal could practically hear his thoughts run; they hadn’t eaten at all last night. But Francis’s death had not been clean by anyone’s standards, and he could tell Will did not favor the idea of cooking him.</p><p> </p><p>And he did not consider the Great Red Dragon to be rude.</p><p> </p><p>Perhaps his righteousness made him so. Deities so often lost themselves in their own arrogance—such was the way of gods, who reigned supreme and thought the world as their weapon, at once both limited and infinite. They forced mortals to kiss the ground at their feet and call it sacred, and made the lives of people beat to their own rhythm. And men who believed themselves to be gods—their inflated faith was their downfall.</p><p> </p><p>But rudeness in men, who were pathetic and pitiful, and rudeness in gods, who gloried in their destruction, were very different things. And this was why Hannibal only gave a murmur of assent when Will said, “I want to bury the body.”</p><p> </p><p>It was the last thing they did together at the house on the sea.</p><p> </p><p>There was a bit of land behind the house that didn’t quite reach the cliffs, where the soil would compact and the earth would roll and roll until it hit the ocean, making it impossible to dig. They took up shovels and commenced under the dawn, the blue of the sky blossoming over the haze of orange and pink like a bruise.</p><p> </p><p>It was a solemn affair. When they had dug a hole deep and wide enough to accommodate for the body, they carried Dolarhyde over to it and set him inside. The man’s throat and face were crusted with dried blood, caked in crumbling brown. He looked pathetic in this light, the mortal shell of what the Dragon had made him to be, back when he had blazed <em> alive. </em></p><p> </p><p>Will set his shovel on the ground and pressed his hands to the upturned dirt, his shoulders shaking as he gasped for breath. Hannibal stopped and stared at him, panting as well, both of their hands covered in the soil’s rich darkness.</p><p> </p><p>For a moment, neither of them spoke.</p><p> </p><p>Finally, Will said, “You . . . you didn’t insist on eating him.”</p><p> </p><p>Hannibal raised an eyebrow. “Should I have?”</p><p> </p><p>“For all your claims about not tolerating discourtesy,” Will said, “you seem to be harboring an unusual amount of lenience toward it.”</p><p> </p><p>“You believe the Red Dragon was discourteous?” Hannibal asked.</p><p> </p><p>“He tried to kill my wife and son,” Will said. His eyes had darkened to the color of storm clouds before the rain.</p><p> </p><p>“At my guidance.”</p><p> </p><p>“Yes.” His face snapped closed, his mind forcing up its walls in an instinctual reaction to shield himself from Hannibal’s prying words. “You’ve made sure that I can’t go back to them. Even in prison, your influences made their way down my mind and wound themselves in the hallways of my dreams.”</p><p> </p><p>Hannibal tilted his head, almost conspiratorially. “Have I influenced you, Will?”</p><p> </p><p>“You’ve certainly tried.”</p><p> </p><p>“Did you think of me in the safety of your home, away from your family?” Hannibal said. “Did you wrestle with yourself as I had long predicted you would?”</p><p> </p><p>“I wanted to step out of my history,” Will said, closing his eyes. “I wanted to write you off and start anew, but every time I was alone the voice in my head that dictated my thoughts spoke in layers of yours, resounding in the silence.”</p><p> </p><p>He looked up when Hannibal didn’t answer, choosing to study him instead—he was clay, the product of Hannibal’s methodical construction, each facet of his psyche so delicately molded with his careful hands.</p><p> </p><p>“When I first arrived in America,” he said, “I came to the state of Arizona. To this day, the Grand Canyon is one of the most beautiful places I have ever taken upon myself to visit. All the rock is built up year after year after year, layered bones in red stone, carved with the strength of the Colorado River. Proof that the current can split mountains into chasms so deep that a single voice carries off the walls of the ravine for what feels like days. Tell me, Will, when you called into the canyon, which did you dread more: the echo or the answer?”</p><p> </p><p>“Both,” Will said. “I could . . . I could hear my thoughts as clearly as if they were being spoken to me. But I told myself there were no base urges for me to give into, no pull of primal desire.”</p><p> </p><p>“Is that why you threw us off of the cliff?”</p><p> </p><p>It was an uncharacteristically blunt question. Will’s eyes widened but he didn’t answer, not for a few minutes, as if he was trying and discarding responses in his mind. At last he said, “It wasn’t predetermined. I wasn’t . . . thinking clearly. Or maybe I was. But it was one of the few times I truly <em> felt </em>alive.”</p><p> </p><p>“You spent your entire life trying not to give yourself into it,” Hannibal said. “If you lived, then you would have no choice but to be reborn with me, and see yourself transformed. But you wanted to kill us both, make less trouble for the living. Jack. Alana. Margot. Now we have the power to send them well on their way to death.”</p><p> </p><p>“Haven’t we made our peace with them?” Will asked.</p><p> </p><p>“Have you?”</p><p> </p><p>Will shook his head. “I think about them, often. But they all seem so far away. So distant from us.”</p><p> </p><p>“They are mortal,” Hannibal said. “And that is the biggest difference—when God looks to the earth, everything is so inconsequential, especially when humans slide so easily to the other side of the veil.”</p><p> </p><p>Will’s laugh was short. “I've achieved immortality now, have I?”</p><p> </p><p>“Timelessness is not a quality we make for ourselves,” Hannibal said. “Time itself is well out of our control. But we hold an influence over our thoughts and our decisions. Have you managed yet to separate yourself from caring?”</p><p> </p><p>“I don’t know,” Will said, staring off into a point on the horizon. “I feel as if I don’t hold the ability to care. But I can still <em> understand </em>, and it is driving me to the point of insanity.”</p><p> </p><p>“You have reached the threshold of morality, but you have carried your empathy up to this point,” Hannibal said. “Now you must choose whether or not to send it over.”</p><p> </p><p>“The thinking is tearing through my mind like a knife,” Will said. “It <em> hurts, </em>the way my life has started to blur. But I haven’t seen the world itself with such clarity in ages, like the fog has cleared itself from the glass. It’s . . . distasteful, how much I welcome the pain.”</p><p> </p><p>He’d seen that from the beginning—Will relished the agony, even if he had denied it all his life. “Pain is not particularly distasteful.”</p><p> </p><p>Will looked over at him ruefully. “At least not as much as other things.”</p><p> </p><p>Hannibal knew what he wanted, knew what he had put the other man through. He wanted to believe that Will had abandoned his heart at the bottom of the ocean, had left it for the dark waters of the Atlantic to engulf and swallow it whole. Will was trying to convince him of that, and in doing so trying to separate empathy from caring. And they <em> were </em>separate things. </p><p> </p><p>Caring made its home in the heart, while empathy . . .</p><p> </p><p><em> Empathy </em> turned the mind into its labyrinth, scorching tunnels through its walls, building connections to things that should never have been connected in the first place. Empathy set the mind on fire.</p><p> </p><p>Empathy <em> burned. </em></p><p> </p><p>Hannibal <em> wanted </em> Will to have left his heart in the sea. But he <em> needed </em>to feel the constant presence of his mind, to hear the cogs and gears ticking away inside his head like clockwork, needed to hear the music of his thoughts, to know the way they flowed differently from any other person in the world. </p><p> </p><p>Once, he had held Will’s mind in the palm of his hand. Now he could not bear the prospect of losing something so precious. </p><p> </p><p>There was, after all, always more digging to be done.</p><p> </p><p>———</p><p> </p><p>They covered the Dragon by the time the sun had fully risen, the freshly upended soil shining a deep brown on the patch of land and the ends of their silver shovels. Will’s head was turned away from him as they walked back to the house to wash themselves; Hannibal followed close. They said nothing to each other as they ran water over their arms and hands, nothing as Hannibal bent to take the soap and let a slight hiss of pain slide through his teeth, his bullet wound protesting the action.</p><p> </p><p>When they were finished, Will turned to him, red staining high on his cheeks from the exertion. “Is Chiyoh . . . ?”</p><p> </p><p>“She will come soon,” Hannibal said. “She is going to decide whether or not to stay with us.”</p><p> </p><p>“I would rather she leave,” Will said, unsurprisingly.</p><p> </p><p>“We can have that arranged.”</p><p> </p><p>They were silent for a while, Will’s head tilted back to let sunlight spill down his cheek and throat. “You would still try to save me, after all of this?”</p><p> </p><p>“There is much I have yet to see you do,” Hannibal said. “Just as there is much I have yet to see you become.”</p><p> </p><p>“Freedom is on the horizon,” Will said, reaching up unconsciously to touch the stitches in his cheek.</p><p> </p><p>Hannibal allowed himself to smile. This was a moment he wanted to worship, the beginning stages of the transformation, the change brought upon by the sea. He would keep coming back, coming back to this day to visit the wrath of the lamb and their reckoning, a long-lived stretch of time.</p><p> </p><p><em> Beautiful Will, </em> he thought, the words tickling the edge of his mind. <em> I dream of the day you will let me taste the true end of your morality. </em></p><p> </p><p>And then, only then, would he be satisfied.</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>So yeah this was kind of a mess, but hopefully the next chapter will be better! I’ll probably upload extremely inconsistently but oh well, I don’t think I should hold myself to the highest of expectations.<br/><br/>Watch the next chapter come out like five months later lmao</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0004"><h2>4. Chapter 4</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>Here it is, Chapter 4, sorry for the slow update! It’s the longest chapter yet, nearly 7,000 words . . . if only I could write that much on my actual projects, *sighs*. So anyway, I was getting into writing this when I realized that I kind of just . . . didn’t plot the chapter (I don’t even know why I just . . . forgot? I don’t know how that even happens??). I had no idea what to do, so I spent like a week just trying to give it some semblance of organization. It’s definitely different than the previous chapters because the bulk of it is actually focused on Chiyoh more than Will and Hannibal (I know, shocking). I swear I’ll explain why at the end of this, uh, hopefully reading about her isn’t too weird!</p></blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>
  <span>Hannibal had found Dolarhyde’s car in a shielded cove, a little ways down from the house on the sea. Without a word, he swung into the driver’s seat, Will and Chiyoh and the rest of their materials following close behind him. The front of the car had been slightly beaten in, but Chiyoh had gotten them gas on one of her supply runs, and it was the best they had—Will was grateful for the very least that Dolarhyde had driven an extremely durable vehicle.</span>
</p>
<p>
  
</p>
<p>
  <span>As they situated themselves, Will met Chiyoh’s gaze in the rearview mirror. “This is everything?”</span>
</p>
<p>
  
</p>
<p>
  <span>She nodded.</span>
</p>
<p>
  
</p>
<p>
  <span>“Where are we going?” Will asked, to no one in particular.</span>
</p>
<p>
  
</p>
<p>
  <span>For a moment, the car was silent. And then: “Where do you want to go?” Hannibal said from beside him.</span>
</p>
<p>
  
</p>
<p>
  <span>The possibilities stretched out before him, unbounded and endless. </span>
  <em>
    <span>Where do you want to go? </span>
  </em>
  <span>Nowhere. Anywhere. </span>
  <em>
    <span>Anywhere but here, </span>
  </em>
  <span>he wanted to say, but he suspected Hannibal expected a real answer. “I . . . never gave much thought to it,” Will said. “I thought before that I was killing myself.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  
</p>
<p>
  <span>“Out of the continent, perhaps?” Hannibal mused.</span>
</p>
<p>
  
</p>
<p>
  <span>“Not to Europe.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  
</p>
<p>
  <span>“Of course not. Perhaps South America—I have always wanted to visit Argentina.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  
</p>
<p>
  <span>Will, who had never been to Argentina, found himself nodding. He did not make any inquiries as to why Hannibal had chosen the country, though he was sure he had his reasons. For now, it was all he could do to wrap his mind around it, the enormity of their situation, the scale of what laid before them. It was only one of the first steps he would be taking in a life in which he had been born again. “Fine,” he said. “That’s fine.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  
</p>
<p>
  <span>“And you, Chiyoh?” Hannibal asked, starting the car and backing out of the cove. “Will you leave us behind? Or will you follow?”</span>
</p>
<p>
  
</p>
<p>
  <span>“I will not leave you behind,” she said. “But . . . I believe it is time for me to break away from dependency. If you call for me, I will always answer, and when the time comes, I may kill for you again. But do not expect me to wait on you hand and foot.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  
</p>
<p>
  <span>What a confident finality that statement was, steeped in absolute certitude. </span>
</p>
<p>
  
</p>
<p>
  <span>“Of course,” Hannibal said. “You are much more than a handmaiden, Chiyoh.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  
</p>
<p>
  <span>The rest of the drive was marked by a silence so thick that it made time flow like slow honey. Will turned away from the others and focused his gaze out of the window, the landscape blurring from rocky cliffs to groves of trees to flatter roads that denoted the entrance to the rest of civilization.</span>
</p>
<p>
  
</p>
<p>
  <span>It was hard not to lose himself to the fear.</span>
</p>
<p>
  
</p>
<p>
  <span>Fear of what he was and fear of what he’d become, and what he was still becoming. Fear of losing himself in the killing, so far gone that there would be no way for him to find the way back. Fear that Hannibal would abandon him, fear for Jack and Alana and all those he had once cared for. Fear for Molly, who had married into an illusion rather than a man.</span>
</p>
<p>
  
</p>
<p>
  <span>He stole a glance at Hannibal, who had his eyes focused on the road. Without turning his head, he said, “Is something on your mind, Will?”</span>
</p>
<p>
  
</p>
<p>
  <span>“No,” Will said, feeling foolish. “I’m just beginning to see you differently.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  
</p>
<p>
  <span>“Just?” Hannibal asked.</span>
</p>
<p>
  
</p>
<p>
  <span>None of them had understood Will as completely as he had.</span>
</p>
<p>
  
</p>
<p>
  <span>In a society ruled by constructs, people boxed themselves in under morals and rights and exacted what they presumed to be justice. Jack’s righteousness was an example of that—he had asked Will to become a killer without really </span>
  <em>
    <span>becoming </span>
  </em>
  <span>a killer. Could he not realize that in doing so, Will would have to strip away his morals? Could he not understand that the very act of it, of taking the shadow of a murderer and wrapping it like a cloak around himself, would destroy him as a “good” man?</span>
</p>
<p>
  
</p>
<p>
  <span>And then there was Hannibal, who, in his offered friendship, had shown Will the reality, and stripped away </span>
  <em>
    <span>society </span>
  </em>
  <span>instead of himself. Here, in this life of cold calculation and manipulated logic, the lines between right and wrong became unfocused. There was only him and the beauty of what he did.</span>
</p>
<p>
  
</p>
<p>
  <span>Had Jack truly been surprised that Will had descended into Hell and chosen the devil?</span>
</p>
<p>
  
</p>
<p>
  <span>“You could say in a new light,” Will said, trying to steer the conversation away from the places his thoughts had started to wander. “Once I thought you might kill me in my sleep.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  
</p>
<p>
  <span>“And now?” Hannibal said.</span>
</p>
<p>
  
</p>
<p>
  <span>“And now you still might,” Will said, “but I am more . . . willing to take that risk.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  
</p>
<p>
  <span>He blinked to find them at a rest stop, somewhere between the suburbs and a city. Chiyoh slipped out of the car to get the gas, neither Will nor Hannibal wanting to risk revealing themselves.</span>
</p>
<p>
  
</p>
<p>
  <span>“We should leave early,” Will said, “if we want to make it to Argentina without drawing attention.” The statement felt so foreign on his tongue; his life until now had been defined in two parts, Louisiana and then the FBI, with nothing to blur the lines—he hadn’t even been outside the States until three years ago.</span>
</p>
<p>
  
</p>
<p>
  <span>Hannibal glanced over at him and gave him a sideways smile—a chill stole its way up Will’s spine, as he had never seen the look on the other man’s face before in all the time they’d known each other. Hannibal rarely smiled when Will was watching him, after all, though he knew he sometimes did when he was turned away. His mouth twisted now into a half-smirk, his lips curving upward like faint wisps of smoke. Will was at once both terrified and thrilled.</span>
</p>
<p>
  
</p>
<p>
  <span>“What is it?” he asked. There was a sharp rap on the window of the car, and Chiyoh crossed her arms impatiently as she waited to be let in. Hannibal unlocked the door, and Will tensed, suddenly overcome by a feeling at once ominous and exhilarating, his heart still plunging off of the cliff on that desolate night with cold wind and colder water. “Hannibal, what do you want?”</span>
</p>
<p>
  
</p>
<p>
  <span>Chiyoh opened the door, and he felt as if he must say something now or hold his tongue forever. Once, Hannibal’s smile would have made his skin crawl; now, he felt something in his stomach coil like a snake, curling with anticipation. It felt like a moment caged by secrecy, a clandestine meeting behind curtains heavy enough that the outside world became an obscure, distant thing. As if to complete the image in his head, Hannibal leaned in, close enough that his voice alone might have been the veil that separated them from civilization.</span>
</p>
<p>
  
</p>
<p>
  <span>There were only seconds before this feeling might be forgotten.</span>
</p>
<p>
  
</p>
<p>
  <span>Will held himself very still.</span>
</p>
<p>
  
</p>
<p>
  <span>“Patience is a virtue, Will,” Hannibal said, softly with an undercurrent of cruelty, like the gentle caress of a knife as it was held against a trembling throat. “Do not concern yourself with such matters as evading the FBI; I am experienced enough in doing so. And I will take us to Argentina.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  
</p>
<p>
  <span>Will turned his gaze downward. “Then what do you mean to say?”</span>
</p>
<p>
  
</p>
<p>
  <span>A pause, a shift, and then a twist—and there it was, the quiet confirmation that Hannibal did indeed have something planned for them, and that it would be best for Will to comply. “There is somewhere else I would like for us to go first.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  
</p>
<p>
  <span>This time, when Will looked up, Hannibal’s smile had faded. Like a flame, quick to ignite and quick to snuff out—moments of affection there and then gone, emotions flickering like candlelight across his face. Will thought about his dream and the masks, and shuddered.</span>
</p>
<p>
  
</p>
<p>
  <span>“I’ll come,” he said all the same, because they both knew that he could spend the rest of his life with no one else, and that his choices had already been made for him. </span>
</p>
<p>
  
</p>
<p>
  <span>And so in the end, Hannibal had found and trapped his lamb. </span>
  <em>
    <span>But what will you do with me?</span>
  </em>
</p>
<p>
  
</p>
<p>
  <span>The next time he stole a glance at the rearview mirror, he found Chiyoh’s dark eyes boring into his own. She leaned against the door of the car, her posture loose and her form relaxed, but her expression was grave, and her lips were creased into a very deep frown.</span>
</p>
<p>
  
</p>
<p>
  <span>———</span>
</p>
<p>
  
</p>
<p>
  <span>Days were marked by infinite minute transformations.</span>
</p>
<p>
  
</p>
<p>
  <span>They were soft, every night muddled by a change in scenery as they moved from one motel to the next, careful to stay anonymous, plucking traces of themselves away from the world’s prying eyes. They moved like waves, like water, and if they left any footprints in the sand of the public, then they were sure to brush them away.</span>
</p>
<p>
  
</p>
<p>
  <span>It was only until Hannibal and Will could properly heal. Then they would set their plans into motion, and Chiyoh too would be washed away from their lives, taken away by the tide.</span>
</p>
<p>
  
</p>
<p>
  <span>Days passed, nights elapsed, and the times between took on a distant, faded palette, already painted in the colors of a memory. If their lives could be a soliloquy, then these moments were the transitions, the near-silent sighs of the actor just as he paused to breathe between the lines.</span>
</p>
<p>
  
</p>
<p>
  <span>It was not the end.</span>
</p>
<p>
  
</p>
<p>
  <em>
    <span>No</span>
  </em>
  <span>, Chiyoh told herself as she perched on the armrest of an old, dilapidated couch, the stuffing pouring out of the faded cushions like smoke from an overflowing cauldron. </span>
  <em>
    <span>I promised myself once that Hannibal will not forget me, and so he will not.</span>
  </em>
</p>
<p>
  
</p>
<p>
  <span>She promised to keep watch for them on the final night, the last that they spent together until they went on their separate paths. When they were asleep, or at least resting, she leaned her back against the wall facing the door and slid down it until her knees were level with her chest. She made no move to draw up the rifle that laid at her side.</span>
</p>
<p>
  
</p>
<p>
  <span>What was her role here? Guardian, protector, defender. Was that all she’d become? There was no doubt in her mind that Hannibal respected her, and valued what she’d done for him. But it didn’t stop the frustration, however irrational, from rooting itself in her heart.</span>
</p>
<p>
  
</p>
<p>
  <span>She cast a glance to the two beds. Both Hannibal and Will slept more lightly now that they were on the run, extracting themselves from the threatening grasp of enervation. Their presence filled the room, and yet still Chiyoh had never felt so alone. On bleak nights such as these, when her own thoughts were cold companions but the only she had, she tried to recollect herself. Make something of the last few years spent trapped in isolation, a prisoner to a prisoner. It was difficult to make sense of it all, to unravel the tangled storylines of her past. But she would rather find meaning in her history than let it float away.</span>
</p>
<p>
  
</p>
<p>
  <span>And so it was that Chiyoh focused her gaze on the door of the motel room, seeing yet not seeing all at once, and let the memories unfold before her in the darkness.</span>
</p>
<p>
  
</p>
<p>
  <span>———</span>
</p>
<p>
  
</p>
<p>
  <em>
    <span>She was five years old when the boy arrived at Castle Lecter.</span>
  </em>
</p>
<p>
  
</p>
<p>
  <em>
    <span>Two hours before noon and it was already proving to be a very curious day—Lady Murasaki had woken earlier than usual, and, after giving Chiyoh the usual lessons on tedious things like doing hair and washing clothes, had snapped her fingers in her familiar brisk fashion and told her that they were going to meet a new </span>
  </em>
  <span>special </span>
  <em>
    <span>resident.</span>
  </em>
</p>
<p>
  
</p>
<p>
  <em>
    <span>Chiyoh walked behind the lady through the corridors of the castle, her footsteps ringing on the marble floors, surrounded on all sides by mute walls of grayish stone that sloped upward into arched ceilings. The whole building was, in her opinion, very drab and altogether rather lifeless. But places like this took a long time getting used to, and she’d only been here a year, sent away from her home in Japan when she was four. She didn’t even know why her parents had done it, only that they had, and suddenly she was travelling across the continent to a foreign land where people spoke in foreign tongues and acted with foreign mannerisms. It meant she must adapt—and so she had.</span>
  </em>
</p>
<p>
  
</p>
<p>
  <em>
    <span>“Keep up,” Lady Murasaki said, descending one of the castle’s massive spiral staircases. Chiyoh leapt to follow, letting her eyes drift toward the vivid skirts of her mistress rather than the dull range of their surroundings.</span>
  </em>
</p>
<p>
  
</p>
<p>
  <em>
    <span>They neared the bottom, where the steps dropped into the castle’s elegant foyer. Here, there came to her ears a number of low, hushed whispers, not with an air of hurriedness or unease but rather the sense of withdrawn quietude, as if the people speaking did not wish to disturb whoever else might reside in the castle. </span>
  </em>
</p>
<p>
  
</p>
<p>
  <em>
    <span>She barely recognized the voice of Robertus Lecter, for she had only heard him speak to Lady Murasaki in snippets of conversation, the constant sharpness of the way he spoke reminding her of the needles she’d pricked her skin with a thousand times while learning to sew. The second voice she did not recognize at all and had never heard before in her life—and yet immediately it captivated her, the rich tenor of his dulcet tones reverberating through her very bones. </span>
  </em>
</p>
<p>
  
</p>
<p>
  <em>
    <span>For some reason, Chiyoh found herself trembling as she descended to meet the two men.</span>
  </em>
</p>
<p>
  
</p>
<p>
  <em>
    <span>“Ah,” Master Lecter said, turning to Lady Murasaki and offering her a tight-lipped smile. He had a quality about him that Chiyoh could only describe as subdued, his face and clothes a study in shades of gray. “Of course, this is my wife.”</span>
  </em>
</p>
<p>
  
</p>
<p>
  <em>
    <span>“Aunt Murasaki,” the man in front of Master Lecter said graciously, taking her extended hand and giving it a firm shake. “I am delighted to meet you at last.”</span>
  </em>
</p>
<p>
  
</p>
<p>
  <em>
    <span>“And so am I,” Lady Murasaki said.</span>
  </em>
</p>
<p>
  
</p>
<p>
  <em>
    <span>It was at this moment that Chiyoh finally peered from behind her mistress’s dress to catch a glimpse of the source of the second voice—and she could barely contain her surprise. It wasn’t a man at all, but a boy—tall and slender but muscled, with dark hair slicked back from his face and even darker eyes.</span>
  </em>
</p>
<p>
  
</p>
<p>
  <em>
    <span>His gaze swept over Chiyoh with an intensity that made her want to curl in on herself. Lady Murasaki followed the boy’s stare and said, “Oh, this is Chiyoh, my handmaiden.”</span>
  </em>
</p>
<p>
  
</p>
<p>
  <em>
    <span>“Hannibal Lecter,” the boy said softly, offering a hand to her. Chiyoh took it politely and shook, the warmth of his fingers branding her skin.</span>
  </em>
</p>
<p>
  
</p>
<p>
  <em>
    <span>“Let me show you to your rooms,” Master Lecter said abruptly, bending to pick up Hannibal’s suitcase and striding to the stairs. “It must be difficult, living by yourself all this time. And you lost your sister very recently, did you not?”</span>
  </em>
</p>
<p>
  
</p>
<p>
  <em>
    <span>Hannibal’s eyes darkened, but otherwise his expression remained perfectly passive. “A terrible accident,” he said. “And one I would very much not like to relive.”</span>
  </em>
</p>
<p>
  
</p>
<p>
  <em>
    <span>“Of course,” Master Lecter said, already ascending. “How insensitive of me.”</span>
  </em>
</p>
<p>
  
</p>
<p>
  <em>
    <span>“No harm done,” Hannibal murmured, and Chiyoh tilted her head, studying the shadows that flitted across his face. He was a very strange boy indeed.</span>
  </em>
</p>
<p>
  
</p>
<p>
  <em>
    <span>As if he could feel the weight of her gaze, he turned toward her once again. Chiyoh looked quickly to the floor, their eyes glancing off each other like magnets of the same charge.</span>
  </em>
</p>
<p>
  
</p>
<p>
  <em>
    <span>“Chiyoh,” Lady Murasaki said, and she took the cue of dismissal, turned to walk away, to bleed into the background where she belonged.</span>
  </em>
</p>
<p>
  
</p>
<p>
  <em>
    <span>She often wondered these days what he would have done if she had stayed just a second longer. Unless she was mistaken, there was a strange sort of longing on his face when he looked at her, the shadows that seemed so alive narrowing his eyes into eerie pinpricks of red.</span>
  </em>
</p>
<p>
  
</p>
<p>
  <em>
    <span>It was the first of many, many curious days to come at Castle Lecter.</span>
  </em>
</p>
<p>
  
</p>
<p>
  <em>
    <span>—</span>
  </em>
</p>
<p>
  
</p>
<p>
  <em>
    <span>Chiyoh was ten years old when Lady Murasaki decided to teach her how to shoot.</span>
  </em>
</p>
<p>
  
</p>
<p>
  <em>
    <span>They began with a makeshift range in an empty courtyard, moving through gun after gun after gun—it was a very peculiar thing to be taught, Chiyoh knew, but she would never be one to pass up an opportunity to defend herself. Day by day, she honed her skills like knives, sharpened them until they shone. She was determined to make herself adept at whatever task her mistress gave to her, having already proven that she was more than just a simple maid.</span>
  </em>
</p>
<p>
  
</p>
<p>
  <em>
    <span>Exactly two years from the first day she had ever curled her fingers around a gun, Chiyoh was crouched at the back gate of Castle Lecter, the one that led to a forest just beyond the premises. This year, the season of fall had crept in with chilly air and a bit of ice, the wind pulling leaves to dance in a multicolored whirlwind around the trees. The ones still remaining on the branches fluttered in pale shades of green, outstretched lobes dangling like the earrings that her lady always wore; the others, reds and oranges and crisp earthen browns, were threads that spun the tapestry of autumn.</span>
  </em>
</p>
<p>
  
</p>
<p>
  <em>
    <span>The deer was a considerable distance away, nosing at something hidden among the grass. Chiyoh pursed her lips and peered at it through the scope of the rifle, familiarizing herself with the way it moved, the careful tread of its feet.</span>
  </em>
</p>
<p>
  
</p>
<p>
  <em>
    <span>A rustling sound came behind her from the right, in the direction of the castle. At first she might have taken it for a stray leaf, carried away by the wind, but then it came again . . . louder. Almost deliberately.</span>
  </em>
</p>
<p>
  
</p>
<p>
  <span>Too </span>
  <em>
    <span>deliberately.</span>
  </em>
</p>
<p>
  
</p>
<p>
  <em>
    <span>She turned to see Hannibal Lecter leaning against the gate, six feet away from where she stood.</span>
  </em>
</p>
<p>
  
</p>
<p>
  <em>
    <span>Chiyoh lowered the rifle and smiled at him.</span>
  </em>
</p>
<p>
  
</p>
<p>
  <em>
    <span>Though he was more than a decade older than her, he still seemed to enjoy her presence. Oftentimes throughout the years he would approach her when she was alone, accompanying her as she did her chores for Lady Murasaki. Through him Chiyoh had learned Lithuanian and a fair amount of English as well—as it turned out, he was fluent in multiple languages.</span>
  </em>
</p>
<p>
  
</p>
<p>
  <em>
    <span>“Practicing your aim, Chiyoh?” he said now.</span>
  </em>
</p>
<p>
  
</p>
<p>
  <em>
    <span>She nodded. “Lady Murasaki says that I am improving.”</span>
  </em>
</p>
<p>
  
</p>
<p>
  <em>
    <span>Hannibal stepped forward, crossing the distance between them in a single stride. “But you have lost the animal now, haven’t you? Since you turned to speak with me.”</span>
  </em>
</p>
<p>
  
</p>
<p>
  <em>
    <span>Chiyoh jerked her eyes back to the clearing the deer had been standing in, but to her dismay, Hannibal was right—it had left from its previous place in the forest. A growl of frustration drew itself from her throat, but it was no one’s fault but hers.</span>
  </em>
</p>
<p>
  
</p>
<p>
  <em>
    <span>Hannibal drew closer, laying his hands on top of hers where they were clasped around the rifle. “May I see?” he asked politely—he was never anything </span>
  </em>
  <span>but</span>
  <em>
    <span> polite. Chiyoh agreed and relinquished her hold on the weapon.</span>
  </em>
</p>
<p>
  
</p>
<p>
  <em>
    <span>“A lesson, Chiyoh, one that Aunt Murasaki may have told you a thousand times, but perhaps it may do you well to hear advice on a different tongue. </span>
  </em>
  <span>Never</span>
  <em>
    <span> take your eyes off the target.” He raised the rifle to his eye, directed it to their left, and shot with such a fluid motion that Chiyoh could barely separate the beginning of it from the end. Not even Lady Murasaki could move like that, with such poise and elegance, like wind given form.</span>
  </em>
</p>
<p>
  
</p>
<p>
  <em>
    <span>For a moment, she was too stunned to speak.</span>
  </em>
</p>
<p>
  
</p>
<p>
  <em>
    <span>Then came a faint murmur of displaced leaves, and, as she watched, a dark mass collapsed to the ground in the forest. Her deer, which she had not even seen.</span>
  </em>
</p>
<p>
  
</p>
<p>
  <em>
    <span>Chiyoh turned to Hannibal, almost indignant: </span>
  </em>
  <span>How did you do that?</span>
  <em>
    <span> But he was already passing the rifle back to her, and she had to focus in order to avoid crumpling under its weight.</span>
  </em>
</p>
<p>
  
</p>
<p>
  <em>
    <span>“No anger, Chiyoh,” he said, smiling in a way that made the ghost of heat creep up her cheeks.</span>
  </em>
</p>
<p>
  
</p>
<p>
  <em>
    <span>“Never,” she said, lifting her chin in defiance of the temper expected for one her age. Others had outbursts, flares of fury—children’s wrath. But all her life, Chiyoh herself had been quiet.</span>
  </em>
</p>
<p>
  
</p>
<p>
  <em>
    <span>“Did you have a plan for what you were going to do once you shot the deer?” Hannibal asked.</span>
  </em>
</p>
<p>
  
</p>
<p>
  <em>
    <span>“I was going to call someone to help me bring it in,” Chiyoh said.</span>
  </em>
</p>
<p>
  
</p>
<p>
  <em>
    <span>Hannibal unlatched the gate. “Come with me.”</span>
  </em>
</p>
<p>
  
</p>
<p>
  <em>
    <span>Chiyoh followed him in a comfortable silence. After a while, though, she said, “Where do you go at night, when you leave the castle?”</span>
  </em>
</p>
<p>
  
</p>
<p>
  <em>
    <span>Hannibal’s face was passive. “The souls of some places are awfully empty,” he said. “Sometimes I need to be reminded that I am anything but.”</span>
  </em>
</p>
<p>
  
</p>
<p>
  <em>
    <span>He often spoke like this, in riddles. Now, Chiyoh did not know why she decided to be so blunt, but the words were out of her mouth before she could stop them. “I’ve seen Mischa’s gravestone.”</span>
  </em>
</p>
<p>
  
</p>
<p>
  <em>
    <span>Hannibal looked sharply toward her but said nothing. Chiyoh went on, “She was killed, wasn’t she? And you are trying to find closure.” Her throat closed off after that, and she could not say more. Hannibal hid his intentions so well, until it came to his sister. Chiyoh did not like the thought of the killer roaming this country, but she liked even less the idea that Hannibal might be seeking revenge.</span>
  </em>
</p>
<p>
  
</p>
<p>
  <em>
    <span>Of course, she did not need to say any of this for him to understand.</span>
  </em>
</p>
<p>
  
</p>
<p>
  <em>
    <span>“You surprise me, Chiyoh,” he said.</span>
  </em>
</p>
<p>
  
</p>
<p>
  <em>
    <span>“I am sorry if I overstepped.” Their feet crunched through the underbrush, and she could see the deer a little distance away, a small, pitiful shape against the leaves and trees.</span>
  </em>
</p>
<p>
  
</p>
<p>
  <em>
    <span>“Intelligence does not need to be bounded, but rudeness does.” Hannibal’s mouth was a thin, twisted thing.</span>
  </em>
</p>
<p>
  
</p>
<p>
  <em>
    <span>“Forgive me, then.”</span>
  </em>
</p>
<p>
  
</p>
<p>
  <em>
    <span>He stopped short, taking her in. “We all forget to be courteous at times,” he said. “And you are very intelligent. Do not forget, Chiyoh, that your power could be limitless.” He did not speak words of forgiveness, and yet he did not seem angry with her either.</span>
  </em>
</p>
<p>
  
</p>
<p>
  <em>
    <span>She frowned. “What do you mean?”</span>
  </em>
</p>
<p>
  
</p>
<p>
  <em>
    <span>“We are mortal, and so disgustingly ordinary,” he said. “The common people walk this earth. You and I have the ability to journey above it, if we wish to do so. You are so often silent, Chiyoh. Write yourself across the sky, and if you still find the notion unappealing, fly for </span>
  </em>
  <span>me</span>
  <em>
    <span>.”</span>
  </em>
</p>
<p>
  
</p>
<p>
  <em>
    <span>She stared at him, dumbfounded. He had never spoken to her like this before and he likely never would again—Hannibal was not the type of man to conjure himself as the romantic. “Hannibal, what are you planning?”</span>
  </em>
</p>
<p>
  
</p>
<p>
  <em>
    <span>But he only shook his head and continued on, kneeling down next to the carcass of the deer. “Come,” he said. “I will teach you how to skin it, and to extract the better parts.”</span>
  </em>
</p>
<p>
  
</p>
<p>
  <em>
    <span>Chiyoh, mildly disturbed, hurried forward—and that marked the end of their conversation. </span>
  </em>
</p>
<p>
  
</p>
<p>
  <em>
    <span>She spent the rest of the day learning how best she ought to kill an animal like the deer, how to take the most valuable areas of its body and give them practical use—and, of course, as Hannibal was ever fascinated with the culinary arts, which parts of it to eat. </span>
  </em>
</p>
<p>
  
</p>
<p>
  <em>
    <span>Never once did it occur to her to ask him how, exactly, he had learned it all himself.</span>
  </em>
</p>
<p>
  
</p>
<p>
  <em>
    <span>—</span>
  </em>
</p>
<p>
  
</p>
<p>
  <em>
    <span>By the time Chiyoh turned thirteen, her entire life had come to revolve around Hannibal Lecter.</span>
  </em>
</p>
<p>
  
</p>
<p>
  <em>
    <span>Since Master Lecter himself had died, Lady Murasaki seemed to find less and less need for Chiyoh by every passing day, often drifting off to her own chambers and spending long hours in the castle alone. Chiyoh did not want to become a burden, and so she managed to tread around the lady’s routine, aiding her only when she asked—which was seldom. This meant, however, that she and Hannibal found more and more time to spend together before he left to study in Florence.</span>
  </em>
</p>
<p>
  
</p>
<p>
  <em>
    <span>He was different these days. More secluded, withdrawn. Chiyoh did not approach him much, either, sensing the distance between them and how he wished to keep it that way. He had begun to leave the castle more and more during the day, though he always returned for dinner—it was impolite, he claimed, to be absent from a meal without an excuse. Not that it really mattered, anyway, as Lady Murasaki rarely joined them at the table and even when she did it was a lonely, somber affair.</span>
  </em>
</p>
<p>
  
</p>
<p>
  <em>
    <span>They had settled into a routine, and Chiyoh leapt for any opportunity that gave her a reason to spend time with Hannibal. Weeks and then months passed in a uniform monotony, and she often wondered if she would be able to go back to Japan—but of course not </span>
  </em>
  <span>now, </span>
  <em>
    <span>when she could not bear to leave Hannibal behind.</span>
  </em>
</p>
<p>
  
</p>
<p>
  <em>
    <span>And then came the night when everything changed.</span>
  </em>
</p>
<p>
  
</p>
<p>
  <em>
    <span>She did not know what caused it—perhaps she had an abnormal talent for sensing infinitesimal changes in the atmosphere—but all she knew was that one night, she woke from her bed with a start.</span>
  </em>
</p>
<p>
  
</p>
<p>
  <em>
    <span>There was a chill that had settled in her very bones, and it was eating her through, gnawing at the frayed edges of her fragmented, leftover dreams.</span>
  </em>
</p>
<p>
  
</p>
<p>
  <em>
    <span>She could not describe it, but there was something about it that was very, very </span>
  </em>
  <span>wrong. </span>
  <em>
    <span>The castle was, as usual, its quiet, hollow self, all the color leached out many years ago, and the wind hushed against the trees outside, sending leaves fluttering against her bedroom window. But it was not the weather that made her heart pound into her throat—oh, no—there was a silent, predatory </span>
  </em>
  <span>stillness </span>
  <em>
    <span>in the air that she could not explain. It seeped into her senses, plunging her into a pit of cold, icy fear, phantom chills tracing their fingers up her spine.</span>
  </em>
</p>
<p>
  
</p>
<p>
  <em>
    <span>She peered out of her window to see a slim, dark figure slipping out the front gate.</span>
  </em>
</p>
<p>
  
</p>
<p>
  <em>
    <span>Chiyoh frowned. It was not as if he had not done this before, but tonight . . .</span>
  </em>
</p>
<p>
  
</p>
<p>
  <em>
    <span>She drew up her coat from where it hung on the rack by her bed, pulling it close to her body. She did not know what she planned to do, if she wanted to follow him or if she wanted to wait, but one thing was certain: she did not want to stay inside the castle tonight.</span>
  </em>
</p>
<p>
  
</p>
<p>
  <em>
    <span>She opened a drawer and pulled out a handgun, letting its weight settle in her palms. It was so </span>
  </em>
  <span>small </span>
  <em>
    <span>compared to the rifles she always used, and she did not have as much experience with it. Her fingers fumbled clumsily on the grip, but it would have to do. </span>
  </em>
</p>
<p>
  
</p>
<p>
  <em>
    <span>She moved around her room as if she were a ghost, touching upon the places she had hidden her various supplies, never quite lingering in any one of them. At last, she drew her hood up to her head, concealing her face, and stole a final glance out of her window.</span>
  </em>
</p>
<p>
  
</p>
<p>
  <span>What am I doing? </span>
  <em>
    <span>She honestly could not tell. But tonight her feet were traitorous things, and they walked her to the door as if they could sense her indecision.</span>
  </em>
</p>
<p>
  
</p>
<p>
  <em>
    <span>Like a wraith, she slipped out of her room, down the stairs, and into the night.</span>
  </em>
</p>
<p>
  
</p>
<p>
  <em>
    <span>—</span>
  </em>
</p>
<p>
  
</p>
<p>
  <em>
    <span>It was by sheer coincidence that she knew to meet him in the cemetery.</span>
  </em>
</p>
<p>
  
</p>
<p>
  <em>
    <span>Chiyoh did not know what drew her to the field of graves, but she found herself walking the winter night among them, booted feet crunching in the grass stiffened by frost. Wandering among the dead, it was no wonder she didn’t </span>
  </em>
  <span>feel </span>
  <em>
    <span>real . . . as if her soul was a ship unmoored, lost without an anchor to hold it by the shore.</span>
  </em>
</p>
<p>
  
</p>
<p>
  <em>
    <span>She walked and walked until she came to the structure she was looking for—an old, solitary block of dark stone, engraved with a single name. Chiyoh knelt, touched her fingers to the cruel carving of the letters, mouthed them to the dark.</span>
  </em>
</p>
<p>
  
</p>
<p>
  <span>Mischa Lecter.</span>
</p>
<p>
  
</p>
<p>
  <em>
    <span>It was a while before she caught sight of the figure striding toward her in the night.</span>
  </em>
</p>
<p>
  
</p>
<p>
  <em>
    <span>She didn’t let herself think. Instead, her mind went blank, her limbs acting for her and overriding any rational thought—within moments, Chiyoh had drawn the gun, scrambling away from the grave to hide herself. She found cover behind a larger monument and pressed her back against it, stealing glances backward as Hannibal approached ever closer to his sister’s grave. Her heart pounded in her chest, adrenaline blazing through her veins like wildfire. That sense of motionless predation she’d felt when she’d woken up surrounded her now like a cloak of lead, dragging her down and smothering everything but the urge to run, run far and fast enough that he would never be able to catch her.</span>
  </em>
</p>
<p>
  
</p>
<p>
  <em>
    <span>Chiyoh shook her head, swallowing back the bile that had risen in her throat. This was </span>
  </em>
  <span>Hannibal, </span>
  <em>
    <span>the same Hannibal she had known for eight entire years—so why was she so afraid?</span>
  </em>
</p>
<p>
  
</p>
<p>
  <em>
    <span>It was then that she noticed the shape he carried in his arms.</span>
  </em>
</p>
<p>
  
</p>
<p>
  <em>
    <span>She stuffed a fist into her mouth to stifle the cry that threatened to tear itself from her throat.</span>
  </em>
</p>
<p>
  
</p>
<p>
  <em>
    <span>It was a body</span>
  </em>
  <span>.</span>
</p>
<p>
  
</p>
<p>
  <em>
    <span>By God, it was a </span>
  </em>
  <span>body</span>
  <em>
    <span>—and then she didn’t know what clicked in her head, but suddenly the puzzle of the last few weeks began to make sense, the pieces drawing themselves together in her mind’s eye. His long absences throughout the day, his unexplained expertise in the art of combat and killing. The darkening of his eyes whenever she spoke of Mischa, the way they gleamed every time he held a weapon.</span>
  </em>
</p>
<p>
  
</p>
<p>
  <em>
    <span>The way he held </span>
  </em>
  <span>himself</span>
  <em>
    <span>, with the unflinching stillness of a hunter.</span>
  </em>
</p>
<p>
  
</p>
<p>
  <em>
    <span>Chiyoh’s hands tightened around her gun until her knuckles were white.</span>
  </em>
</p>
<p>
  
</p>
<p>
  <em>
    <span>She watched as Hannibal set the man down before Mischa’s gravestone, and pulled a long, thin knife from beneath his coat.</span>
  </em>
</p>
<p>
  
</p>
<p>
  <em>
    <span>Her breath caught in her throat. </span>
  </em>
  <span>No. </span>
  <em>
    <span>Would he? But she did not need a response to that question—the answer was yes. Yes, of course he would, it was in his nature and she had seen it before, seen it in his eyes the first time they had ever met. Of course, she had just been too blind to realize what it all meant until now.</span>
  </em>
</p>
<p>
  
</p>
<p>
  <em>
    <span>Hannibal ran his fingers over the blade, which gleamed silver in the moonlight. Chiyoh watched in horror as he brought it to the man’s shirt and slashed down, ripping the fabric but leaving the body untouched.</span>
  </em>
</p>
<p>
  
</p>
<p>
  <em>
    <span>And then he rested the tip of the knife to the skin just below the man’s pale chest.</span>
  </em>
</p>
<p>
  
</p>
<p>
  <em>
    <span>She could not bear it anymore. Stepping forward, her voice ringing like a church bell in the dim night, she called, “Hannibal.”</span>
  </em>
</p>
<p>
  
</p>
<p>
  <em>
    <span>He jerked his head up so quickly that she took an involuntary step back.</span>
  </em>
</p>
<p>
  
</p>
<p>
  <em>
    <span>She shrank beneath his gaze. </span>
  </em>
  <span>Mistake, </span>
  <em>
    <span>every part of her was screaming—what she would give, just so he would stop looking at her like that. </span>
  </em>
  <span>You’ve made a terrible, terrible mistake.</span>
</p>
<p>
  
</p>
<p>
  <em>
    <span>And then Hannibal </span>
  </em>
  <span>smiled.</span>
</p>
<p>
  
</p>
<p>
  <em>
    <span>It was a vicious, feral grin, full of teeth that shone white against the darkness of his features, the red pinpricks of his eyes. It was the sort of smile that would make any sane man turn and run in fear, much less a thirteen-year-old girl.</span>
  </em>
</p>
<p>
  
</p>
<p>
  <em>
    <span>In the moment, Chiyoh was genuinely terrified for her own life.</span>
  </em>
</p>
<p>
  
</p>
<p>
  <em>
    <span>“Chiyoh,” Hannibal said genially.</span>
  </em>
</p>
<p>
  
</p>
<p>
  <em>
    <span>She raised the gun, directing it at him with shaking hands. “Hannibal,” she said, not trusting herself to speak more than his name.</span>
  </em>
</p>
<p>
  
</p>
<p>
  <em>
    <span>“Are you going to shoot me, Chiyoh?” Hannibal said.</span>
  </em>
</p>
<p>
  
</p>
<p>
  <em>
    <span>She looked down at the gun, down at the sleek metal between her hands. She could do it. She could go through with it—just press down on the trigger, and kill him. Or at least detain him. “I will if you come any closer,” she said, her voice wavering.</span>
  </em>
</p>
<p>
  
</p>
<p>
  <em>
    <span>He shook his head and gave a soft laugh. “You are shaking too much for your aim to be any good.” He took one hand away from the knife. “Come here, Chiyoh, or I will come to you.”</span>
  </em>
</p>
<p>
  
</p>
<p>
  <em>
    <span>Walking to him would surely be consigning herself to her own death, but turning the other way to run . . . Chiyoh swallowed. Where would she even go? There was no one in Castle Lecter who would be able to help her, and there was no doubt in her mind that Hannibal could move at a thousand times her own speed.</span>
  </em>
</p>
<p>
  
</p>
<p>
  <em>
    <span>Her head spinning, she took a step toward him. And then another. And then another. Stopped short before the man’s body, lowered her gun. She hated that there was a part of her that still gravitated toward him, even now.</span>
  </em>
</p>
<p>
  
</p>
<p>
  <em>
    <span>She fought to keep her voice even. “Hannibal, what have you done?”</span>
  </em>
</p>
<p>
  
</p>
<p>
  <em>
    <span>“This is my calling,” he said. “My retribution.”</span>
  </em>
</p>
<p>
  
</p>
<p>
  <em>
    <span>She did her best to level her gaze at him. “This is the man who murdered your sister.”</span>
  </em>
</p>
<p>
  
</p>
<p>
  <em>
    <span>Hannibal did not answer her—should she say more? Chiyoh opened her mouth, but all of a sudden the knife in his hand was blurring into motion, digging down into the man’s chest and drawing up a thick line of blood. The sight of it shocked her into an uncontrollable terror and a fury that she had never known before in her life.</span>
  </em>
</p>
<p>
  
</p>
<p>
  <em>
    <span>Without thinking, she launched herself at Hannibal, throwing herself between him and the man; he blinked once in surprise before his arms came down on her shoulders, forcing her to the ground. She landed on her back with a thud, the gun skidding from her hand across the wet grass.</span>
  </em>
</p>
<p>
  
</p>
<p>
  <em>
    <span>“Do not kill him,” she gasped, as Hannibal raised the knife above her head, letting her catch a glimpse of her wild reflection in the crimson-lined silver. “Please, Hannibal, he is not worth—”</span>
  </em>
</p>
<p>
  
</p>
<p>
  <em>
    <span>“Did you know,” Hannibal interjected disdainfully, “that he murdered my sister and then ate her, too? Every last bit. A pity.”</span>
  </em>
</p>
<p>
  
</p>
<p>
  <em>
    <span>Chiyoh was speechless, caught in the horrifying manic gleam in his eyes.</span>
  </em>
</p>
<p>
  
</p>
<p>
  <em>
    <span>“I could have chosen a sword, or something showier,” Hannibal continued. “Aunt Murasaki loves her katana, her symbols of the samurai.”</span>
  </em>
</p>
<p>
  
</p>
<p>
  <em>
    <span>Slowly, he brought the tip of his knife to rest against Chiyoh’s throat.</span>
  </em>
</p>
<p>
  
</p>
<p>
  <em>
    <span>“Please,” she squeaked.</span>
  </em>
</p>
<p>
  
</p>
<p>
  <em>
    <span>“Tell me why I should not kill him.”</span>
  </em>
</p>
<p>
  
</p>
<p>
  <em>
    <span>But Chiyoh did not have the words. She searched and searched for them, rifled through the things she could say like unwanted letters, grasped for them like a man seizing for his walking stick in the dark—but she could not force the messages out. She was drowning, drowning in her fear, the black sea of her horror closing over her head and choking off her breath.</span>
  </em>
</p>
<p>
  
</p>
<p>
  <em>
    <span>“Time is ticking, Chiyoh,” Hannibal said, the words taking on a musical, almost sing-song quality.</span>
  </em>
</p>
<p>
  
</p>
<p>
  <em>
    <span>She made herself breathe, forced her head above the water. Looked into his eyes even as the blood from the man beneath her ran in rivulets down her neck. “Revenge is a hollow thing,” she began, fighting off the urge to swallow as the weapon dug deeper into her flesh. “He is your tether.” She barely even knew what she was saying.</span>
  </em>
</p>
<p>
  
</p>
<p>
  <em>
    <span>Hannibal gave a low, quiet laugh, his voice like silk over her senses even now, underlaid with the beautiful deep velvet of his baritone. “What would you know of revenge, Chiyoh?”</span>
  </em>
</p>
<p>
  
</p>
<p>
  <em>
    <span>“You called me very intelligent once,” she said. “If you kill this man now, there is nothing left for you to do. Mischa is gone.” She screwed her eyes shut as she felt a spark of pain blossom above her collarbone. “Mischa is </span>
  </em>
  <span>gone, </span>
  <em>
    <span>Hannibal, and you will spend the rest of your life lost if you kill this man. There will be nothing left to connect you back to her, and you will get no satisfaction.”</span>
  </em>
</p>
<p>
  
</p>
<p>
  <em>
    <span>He hesitated, then, as if he were genuinely considering her words. Spurred on by his indecision, Chiyoh said, rather boldly, “Leave him to me.”</span>
  </em>
</p>
<p>
  
</p>
<p>
  <em>
    <span>Hannibal tilted his head in question.</span>
  </em>
</p>
<p>
  
</p>
<p>
  <em>
    <span>“Leave him to me,” she said again. “I shall lock him up and keep him here. I will draw out his suffering for you if that is what you would like. With me, his fate will be set in stone, and it will be as if you yourself have indeed killed him.”</span>
  </em>
</p>
<p>
  
</p>
<p>
  <em>
    <span>“Why endure the suffering when Death extends its hand?” Hannibal murmured, and in the moment Chiyoh did not know if he was speaking in regards to the killer or herself.</span>
  </em>
</p>
<p>
  
</p>
<p>
  <em>
    <span>“I will </span>
  </em>
  <span>make </span>
  <em>
    <span>him suffer for you,” Chiyoh said, opening her eyes. Let him see the truth there, or as much of it as she could bear to give him. “I will exact your revenge while you are in Florence, I will make him </span>
  </em>
  <span>regret </span>
  <em>
    <span>every part of your sister that he ate.”</span>
  </em>
</p>
<p>
  
</p>
<p>
  <em>
    <span>It felt like an eternity before the knife finally lifted from her throat, and Chiyoh exhaled in relief, pushing herself up from the nearly-frozen earth. Beneath her, the man stirred slightly, fingers twitching. Hannibal looked as if he would like nothing better than to break every one of them.</span>
  </em>
</p>
<p>
  
</p>
<p>
  <em>
    <span>“I am leaving soon,” he said. “Do not expect to hear from me again.” He bent to retrieve her gun and handed it to her.</span>
  </em>
</p>
<p>
  
</p>
<p>
  <em>
    <span>“I . . .” But what could she say? Hannibal </span>
  </em>
  <span>was </span>
  <em>
    <span>leaving soon, and there was nothing she could do to stop him. “Help me take him to the prison, he can reside there. I know where the keys are hidden.” She jerked her head in the direction of the castle.</span>
  </em>
</p>
<p>
  
</p>
<p>
  <em>
    <span>Hannibal knelt and lifted him as if he weighed nothing at all. Chiyoh shivered—a creature that belonged in the dark, that’s what he was, that was what she had witnessed tonight.</span>
  </em>
</p>
<p>
  
</p>
<p>
  <em>
    <span>Together they set off toward the castle in silence. When they had retrieved the key from one of the rooms inside, they made their way to Chiyoh’s chosen cell, and Hannibal said, “I would recommend you to carry your rifle everywhere you go.”</span>
  </em>
</p>
<p>
  
</p>
<p>
  <em>
    <span>She unlocked the door and held it open for him. “Handguns are smaller and easier to conceal.”</span>
  </em>
</p>
<p>
  
</p>
<p>
  <em>
    <span>“But you are confident with rifles in a way that you are not with any other weapon,” Hannibal said.</span>
  </em>
</p>
<p>
  
</p>
<p>
  <em>
    <span>“I can learn with other weapons,” Chiyoh said.</span>
  </em>
</p>
<p>
  
</p>
<p>
  <em>
    <span>“Then learn.” It wasn’t as if he cared either way, she thought as he strode into the cell and dumped the man unceremoniously on the ground.</span>
  </em>
</p>
<p>
  
</p>
<p>
  <em>
    <span>He touched a hand to her shoulder as she let the door slide shut and turned the key in the lock, trapping the man within. It was a brief motion, like the flutter of the wings of an insect, there for a mere moment before it flitted away.</span>
  </em>
</p>
<p>
  
</p>
<p>
  <em>
    <span>When she looked up, Hannibal’s face was closed.</span>
  </em>
</p>
<p>
  
</p>
<p>
  <em>
    <span>“Remember your vow,” he said, and turned abruptly on his heel and walked away. Chiyoh watched him go, leaving her behind with the prisoner and condemning her to be forever trapped in this place, too.</span>
  </em>
</p>
<p>
  
</p>
<p>
  <em>
    <span>The world suddenly seemed so small now that she had nowhere else to go.</span>
  </em>
</p>
<p>
  
</p>
<p>
  <em>
    <span>Chiyoh did not see Hannibal the next day when he left early for Florence. When she walked into the kitchen, there was only a single piece of paper lying on the table, a crisp white note filled with his beautiful calligraphy.</span>
  </em>
</p>
<p>
  
</p>
<p>
  <span>To Chiyoh, </span>
  <em>
    <span>it read. When she flipped it over, there were only two sentences written in the looping font. </span>
  </em>
</p>
<p>
  
</p>
<p>
  <span>I am thinking of you, though you will never see me again. Would you kill the killer if you could?</span>
</p>
<p>
  
</p>
<p>
  <span>—Hannibal</span>
</p>
<p>
  
</p>
<p>
  <em>
    <span>She frowned. Why in the world would she kill the man after all that trouble to prevent Hannibal from doing just that?</span>
  </em>
</p>
<p>
  
</p>
<p>
  <em>
    <span>His words from the previous night came back to her now, echoing in the chambers of her mind. </span>
  </em>
  <span>Why endure the suffering when Death extends its hand?</span>
</p>
<p>
  
</p>
<p>
  <em>
    <span>There wasn’t an answer—or perhaps there was a very, very simple one. </span>
  </em>
  <span>Endure it because you must</span>
  <em>
    <span>, Chiyoh thought. All her life, she’d been a shadow—the girl erased from her homeland like a stray line in a penciled masterpiece, forever hidden behind the vibrant life of Lady Murasaki, brushed over too by Master Lecter like his wife’s domestic lapdog. Hannibal had been the only family she’d really known—and she owed him a great debt from all the years of kindness.</span>
  </em>
</p>
<p>
  
</p>
<p>
  <span>Endure you must. </span>
  <em>
    <span>She trapped the phrase in her mind for all of the ensuing years in which she remained at Castle Lecter, confined in her own right, as a thousand days and lives passed before her eyes. Before she knew it, she was alone.</span>
  </em>
</p>
<p>
  
</p>
<p>
  <em>
    <span>It would be more than a decade until the old castle would be remembered, and only then would someone come to set her free.</span>
  </em>
</p>
<p>
  
</p>
<p>
  <span>———</span>
</p>
<p>
  
</p>
<p>
  <span>They did not whisper their goodbyes, or extend a hand of farewell. When the day came, Chiyoh simply . . . walked away.</span>
</p>
<p>
  
</p>
<p>
  <span>It was liberating, turning her back on the man she’d been tied to for so many years. She thought back to what he had said to her, all those years ago. </span>
  <em>
    <span>Write yourself across the sky, and if you still find the notion unappealing, fly for </span>
  </em>
  <span>me.</span>
</p>
<p>
  
</p>
<p>
  <span>The weight of Mischa’s killer had been lifted from her chest, and her soul clawed itself free from its chains. So this was what freedom felt like. Freedom to go on her own, freedom to live her own life as she wanted to. She would never truly rid herself from Hannibal’s influence, and if he called for her aid there was no doubt in her mind that she would come to answer him.</span>
</p>
<p>
  
</p>
<p>
  <span>But for now, she could care for no one else but herself. And that—the independence, the release, the salvation—that was what made her throw her head back toward the sky and drink in the vibrancy of her own spirit.</span>
</p>
<p>
  
</p>
<p>
  <em>
    <span>Fly for me.</span>
  </em>
  <span> She had finally grown out of her past—if Will had undergone a transformation, then so had she.</span>
</p>
<p>
  
</p>
<p>
  <em>
    <span>Fly for me. </span>
  </em>
  <span>She turned her head to the sky and truly </span>
  <em>
    <span>smiled </span>
  </em>
  <span>for the first time in her life.</span>
</p>
<p>
  
</p>
<p>
  <em>
    <span>Fly.</span>
  </em>
</p>
<p>
  
</p>
<p>
  <span>She would, both for him and for herself. She would take to the skies in this new life, for in it . . .</span>
</p>
<p>
  
</p>
<p>
  <span>In it, crafted from the ashes of her history, Chiyoh had been gifted wings.</span>
</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>Alright! I promised an explanation for the entire Chiyoh thing at the end of this, so here it is.<br/><br/>So. I know the whole point of me writing this was to describe the internal journey that Will and Hannibal went through right after the fall, but I still needed to keep a little semblance of plot (even though I’m terrible at plotting and a lot of this fic was, uh . . . suspiciously convenient). Obviously, I couldn’t have them go through the entire healing process by themselves—so enter Chiyoh, a character seemingly so perfectly created for situations like this to be the savior, the one to get them out of this alive.<br/><br/>And that’s where I ran into an issue. It’s obvious that I love this show—the characters are beautifully written and complex, the dynamics are strong, and overall it’s just <i>really fucking good</i>. But I couldn’t help but get a little irritated at the work done with some of the side characters, particularly Chiyoh herself. For all the intricacy of the main characters like Will and Hannibal, she seemed, to me, just like a deus ex machina. She <i>always</i> seemed to be there for everyone to rescue them from seemingly unrescuable situations. And I understand that a little plot convenience isn’t that bad at all when faced with the deeper, psychological aspects of the show—which were all done so well—but one can only use a character for things like this so many times before you have to justify them, or at least give the audience a bit <i>more</i> from their story.<br/><br/>I ended up taking particular notice of this frustration of mine when I wrote the first three chapters of this fic. It all seemed so predictable—Will and Hannibal will die if they don’t get any aid, so who’s there to help them? Of course, Chiyoh. But having her show up on the page for two seconds simply to further the plot seemed like an insult to her character. So instead of just having her leave them behind and move on with the story without another trace of her, I decided to flesh out her character a little and give her more depth than Bryan Fuller had the time to do.<br/><br/>I had originally intended a few snippets of flashbacks from her past, but if anyone has read my writing then they know that I tend to have . . . <i>issues</i> with brevity. A little turned into a lot, and a lot turned into a document of three times from her life at Castle Lecter that spanned more than ten pages. I tried cutting it, but leaving parts of it out with so little screen time in the show dedicated to her already didn’t feel <i>right</i>. So I just kept everything as it was—thus the 7,000 words chapter. I know that this might not be what everyone was expecting, but I had so much fun unraveling her character for myself and, in the process, interpreting some of Hannibal’s backstory as well.<br/><br/>Yes, I swear I’ll get back to Will and Hannibal and all of their poetic angst in the next few chapters as I close out the fic with Bedelia. Thanks for bearing with me in this, I hope my (questionable) writing choices make a little more sense! Chapter 5 should be shorter, so hopefully I can get it out sooner. Thank you for reading!</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0005"><h2>5. Chapter 5</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>Aaand this is Chapter 5. Bedelia’s getting introduced in this part, so cheers to that! I had a great time writing about her and getting into a bit more of the (sparse) action that this fic is going to see. It’s the beginning of the end here, folks.</p></blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>
  <span>The current residence of Bedelia Du Maurier was, unsurprisingly, extremely ordinary.</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>Wooden shutters had been closed against the windy evening, tidy brickwork painted a pale, unassuming gray. The trim was a faded white, not quite dark enough to be the shade of the rest of the house but not bright enough to draw the attention of the eye. A flawless concrete path led to a double oak door and wound around a sizable maple tree, sturdy branches unmoving against the heavy breeze.</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>Will did not bother to insult Hannibal by asking if it was the right place.</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>The other man was staring up at the house, grazing his hand across his bullet wound almost unconsciously. It was taking longer to heal, which was expected—it was by far the most lethal wound either of them had been dealt that night, made worse by the fall into the ocean.</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>Sometimes Will would look at that wound or feel the acute sting of one of his own as he moved, and he would be transported back to the edge of the cliff, bloodied and bruised and broken but </span>
  <em>
    <span>alive</span>
  </em>
  <span>—so alive, so high off the thrill of killing, that he wondered if he had meant to tip them into the sea at all or if the ground had just simply fallen away beneath his feet.</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>They started up the path to the door, that dark barrier between them and the woman they had both come to kill, death’s border between life and the afterlife. There was a sort of beauty in the symbolism, if beauty were as sharp and quick to cut as a blade. Alas, a pity—a pity that no one had time to appreciate the poetry.</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>Hannibal rang the doorbell, filling the air with a silver chiming, delicate notes twirling about with each other like swift-footed dancers. He leaned back, looked to Will, and smiled assuredly—he smiled more frequently these days than he ever had before.</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>Will counted exactly fifteen seconds before the door opened.</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>Bedelia had not changed since they had last seen her. She wore a pristine blue dress, her hair falling in perfectly-styled curls over her shoulders, posture rigid and face set in a carefully neutral expression. Her lips pressed into a thin line as she regarded the two of them, her inscrutable countenance changing into one of thinly-veiled disgust—and fear.</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>“Hello, Bedelia,” Hannibal said casually, before she slammed the door in his face.</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>Or tried to, at least.</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>Hannibal intervened so quickly that Will could barely follow the motion; his body blurred, his foot coming to rest between the door and the frame just before it closed. From there he pried it open, the wood creaking in protest as he forced it wide, making way for Will to step inside.</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>Bedelia stood motionless in the foyer, her eyes wide. </span>
  <em>
    <span>A deer in headlights, </span>
  </em>
  <span>Will thought.</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>Hannibal closed the door behind him with a soft click, clasping his hands. “Moving awfully quickly, Bedelia.”</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>Her smile was stretched taut across her face. “Please,” she said, gesturing farther into the house. “Come in.”</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>They followed.</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>She invited them into the living room, a tidy space spanned by wooden planks that sang a chorus of browns, an elegant orchestra of hues. The walls were painted a creamy white that contrasted the dark leather sofas, sitting quaint and prim as testimonies to the immaculate nature of their owner.</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>Bedelia took the smaller one, sitting across from Hannibal and Will in a manner not unlike their “therapy” sessions, meetings in which they had thrown their discussions back and forth like stones to make ripples in each others’ psyches.</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>Will glanced at Hannibal, who leaned back and crossed his legs. The seconds of silence turned to minutes, which soon felt as if they were becoming hours—what was there even to say? What was there that he </span>
  <em>
    <span>could </span>
  </em>
  <span>say? And Hannibal—what did Hannibal have in mind for this journey, this stopping point, this temporary break in their river of time?</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>Bedelia broke first. “They found the footage of you back in the house. It had been running for quite some time—captured most of what they needed to know.” </span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>Hannibal nodded; they had made the decision together to leave the camera for Jack to find, the recording of their would-have-been deaths. Thinking about it, Will could still see Dolarhyde’s face, the grim satisfaction written all over his features. Hannibal had wanted to show their fall to the world, theirs and the fall of the Dragon, had wanted that moment to be </span>
  <em>
    <span>known.</span>
  </em>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>And so it had been.</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>“Did they now?” Hannibal said now. “They put it on the news as well, I presume?”</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>“On television for days,” Bedelia said. “They did not find your bodies, so the FBI assumed the worst. And then they unearthed the corpse.”</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>Will cast his gaze downward, unable to meet her eyes.</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>“You survived,” she said, sighing after another long stretch of quiet.</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>“Would you have preferred us not to?” Hannibal asked.</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>“Perhaps not,” she said. “Given the chance, you would slit all of our throats, and then where would we be? It is good fun for you, Hannibal, to see us served at your table like the dull, insipid dishes we are.”</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>“Not yet,” he said. “Not yet, Bedelia. Only when the opportunity arises.” His tone held a casual ease, something that had once unnerved Will but was now simply as much a part of him as his accent, artless and intrinsic. “And I should hope you know that my food is never bland.”</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p><span>“Your taste is too refined for such an error,” Bedelia said coldly. “I see you’ve picked </span><em><span>him” </span></em><span>—she gestured toward Will—</span> <span>“up to go along with you. Have you changed your mind about eating him?”</span></p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>Will jerked his head up toward Hannibal, his heart leaping into his throat. He had known, but had never seriously thought—</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>“I have other plans for dinner,” Hannibal said lightly.</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>Bedelia tilted her chin up, narrowing her eyes. </span>
  <em>
    <span>I honestly don’t know what you see in him, </span>
  </em>
  <span>she seemed to say, and Will returned her glare with one of his own. “What plans would those be?”</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>“If one truly wishes to ascend beyond the mortal realm,” Hannibal said, “one must cut their ties with the living.” The implication was clear: </span>
  <em>
    <span>that is why we have come.</span>
  </em>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>“Surely you have more . . . </span>
  <em>
    <span>living </span>
  </em>
  <span>ties than I.” </span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>The psychiatrist’s voice was evocative, and for a split second, Will had the sudden vivid image of the Wendigo, antlers tangled in a spool of thread, winding down and down and down and down . . .</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>“</span>
  <em>
    <span>It would be a shame not to savor you</span>
  </em>
  <span>,” Hannibal said, and Will blinked.</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>Bedelia closed her eyes as if to steady herself, and when she opened them, her mouth was twisted, her hands clenched on the armrest so hard that her knuckles were white. In his mind’s eye, Will saw the strings falling from Hannibal one by one, amassing in a shadow so deep that even he could not tell what lay inside. But that was the spell, the </span>
  <em>
    <span>appeal </span>
  </em>
  <span>of him, wasn’t it—cut the ties, transcend the realm, rise to the glory of God.</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>“Have I finally marinated </span>
  <em>
    <span>long enough for your taste, </span>
  </em>
  <span>then?” Bedelia said. Will could not help but wonder at the words—they felt like statements spoken from another time, another room in the palace of Hannibal’s mind, one of which he had not yet crossed the threshold.</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>Hannibal’s smile had always held a certain unique quality, one that, when revealed in an exchange, had the ability to narrow the world to a razor’s edge. “Won’t you do me the honor of showing me to your kitchen, Bedelia?”</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>Will swallowed, and her eyes widened in surprise.</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>———</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>Hannibal’s departure had far from lightened the mood of the visit. </span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>Will found himself alone with Bedelia once she had given them instructions to the kitchen; they reseated themselves across from each other now in a mockery of their history. So much of their time had been spent like this, isolated in a simple room expressing complex contentions. The air laid thick and sluggish between them now, like smoke in its heavy torpor. The last bit of conversation had come and gone with Hannibal’s “I will be going, Will, and please do not accompany me,” followed by a polite tilt of his head.</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>Bedelia turned her gaze on him, blue-gray eyes filled with something akin to apprehension. Will could not blame her—it was unwise, at this point, </span>
  <em>
    <span>not </span>
  </em>
  <span>to be terrified. “It was very kind of you to organize my own Last Supper for me,” she said. “In another world, I might appreciate the sentiment.”</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>He did not trust himself to know what to say. He had not spoken many words these past few days—everything had been blurred, everything had passed too quickly for him to truly </span>
  <em>
    <span>respond </span>
  </em>
  <span>to it.</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>“Can you speak?” she asked. “With your—well, your . . .” She gestured vaguely toward his face. It was unusual for Bedelia to stumble over her words, the slip only betraying the true extent of her terror. “You are awfully quiet.”</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>Will resisted the urge to touch his hand to his cheek. “I’ve simply had a lot on my mind.”</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>“You threw both yourself and him off of a cliff,” Bedelia said. “Of course you have had </span>
  <em>
    <span>a lot on your mind</span>
  </em>
  <span>.” She tilted her head. “Why did you do it?”</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>“Because . . .” Will’s hands were shaking, and he composed himself with effort. “Because I could not bear what I was becoming.” He felt like a broken record, repeating the same statement over and over for days. “Or perhaps because I wanted it, I wanted </span>
  <em>
    <span>him</span>
  </em>
  <span>.” He did not know why he was telling this to her, but if she was to die anyway, he supposed, there was no harm in doing so.</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>Bedelia frowned. “I told you once that nothing is more dangerous than a man who has just found religion.”</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>He laughed. “When you said that I was only beginning to find my faith. It took me a while to accept its beliefs, and we do not pray to any god.”</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>Bedelia’s voice was quiet. “Yes. Your religion is so deadly because you worship each other.”</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <em>
    <span>Can’t live with him, can’t live without him. </span>
  </em>
  <span>The words were sudden and sharp as they emerged from his memory, swimming within the surface waters of his mind. That was what it had come down to, in the end. Will had given himself over to the sea because he could not imagine a life without Hannibal, and neither did he want to live it.</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>“What can I say?” he said. “I suppose I am finally coming into my element.”</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>“And what would that be?” Bedelia asked. “Your element—which elements are transformed to constitute your light?”</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>To his surprise, what came out of his mouth next was not a remark of his own, but of Hannibal’s. “Blood and breath are only elements undergoing change to fuel my radiance.” They were words that had been said to him, once, and said as well to the Great Red Dragon.</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>Bedelia released a single breath. “Killing brings you into the light.”</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>“What about you, Bedelia?” Will said. “What of your radiance? You spent all that time with Hannibal in Europe—you must have managed to learn something from him.”</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>“I have found that I have not . . . </span>
  <em>
    <span>relished </span>
  </em>
  <span>my time as much as you have yours,” she said. “He asked me, once, whether I wanted to observe or participate in a murder. Surely you are familiar with the notion.”</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>“Of observing, or of participating?”</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>She leveled a flat stare at him. “You know which.”</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>He swallowed against the memories that wound through his mind. Visions of Frederick Chilton, the Great Red Dragon, a recollection of lies. The hand on his shoulder. The strike of the match. Bedelia’s slow, darkly satisfied voice: </span>
  <em>
    <span>That’s participation.</span>
  </em>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>Will cleared his throat, pulling himself into the present. “Which did you choose, then?” The answer could swing either way—Bedelia did not delight in ending lives as they did, and yet she did not abhor it. She disdained weakness just as Hannibal disdained discourtesy; to her, the intolerance laid in the inherent disposition of humanity. </span>
  <em>
    <span>A primal rejection of weakness which is every bit as natural as the nurturing instinct.</span>
  </em>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>Vulnerability in infirmity, ruthlessness to vulnerability.</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <em>
    <span>A wounded bird . . . I want to crush it.</span>
  </em>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>“I chose to observe,” she said.</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>Will could not say that he was exactly surprised. As he sat across from her and listened to her speak, the pieces began to click in his mind: the two of them in Europe, an unrecognizable victim curled on the ground in a stunning display of ruination, Bedelia’s wide eyes and shuddering breaths as she beheld the blood on Hannibal’s hands. She would have met them before—perhaps she would have even known them, just as Will had known Chilton. </span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>“He denied you the choice of observation entirely,” he guessed. “You were curious of what the victim would do, of what Hannibal would do. And when the end arrived, you couldn’t fully claim that it was not what you were expecting. That wasn’t observation, Bedelia.”</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>“No,” she said. “It was not.”</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>“Then perhaps that’s even why we’re here.”</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>“Because my time with Hannibal was </span>
  <em>
    <span>difficult</span>
  </em>
  <span>?” Her smile was humorless, almost scornful. “Because I participated under the guise of observation? You practically confessed to doing the same thing yourself.”</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>“He gave you a gift,” Will said, ignoring her contempt.</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>“He gave you one as well, and you rejected it.”</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>“Forgiveness is such a fluid thing,” said Will. “We may forgive those who have committed the most grievous sins while we swear revenge on matters of the least consequence. And it is all so often blocked by what we feel for the person we are forgiving.”</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>Bedelia did not bother to waste time on assertions so convoluted as the one he had just made. “Rudeness is unforgivable, and he loves you.”</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>“Yes.” There was no denial—he was sick of denial after all these years, sick of rejecting every sentiment that dared to cross his mind.</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>She did not reply to him this time. Instead, after a moment’s hesitation, she swallowed hard and stood suddenly, snapping upright from the sofa. “Will you come? I would wish to prepare something for you before I die.”</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>As it turned out, even Bedelia could not hide from them forever. “What is it?” Will asked.</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>“A surprise,” she said, offering him a hand. “Will you follow?”</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>Will, bemused, trailed behind her until they reached a stairwell. He paused at the landing, staring up at her ascending figure. It could be an attempt to escape—but then where would she go? “Hurry,” she called, already halfway to the second floor. “I am sure Hannibal will want to see us soon, and it would be rude to keep him waiting.”</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>Will took a helpless step forward, starting after her again. Bedelia led him to a door at the far left end of a dimly-lit corridor, and his presumption of the room to be either an office or a bedroom was confirmed as she stepped inside, giving him a view of a tidy bed and a large window overlooking the yard below.</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>He tried once more: “Bedelia, what have you prepared?”</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>“A surprise,” she said again, her voice clipped. “Wait here until it is ready.” Before Will could respond, the door closed, cold and heavy and dark between them.</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>It did not take years of studying the psychology of human behavior to recognize the stain of fear driven deep into the words. It did not take years to perceive the lie, either, so hastily fabricated and resounding in its frantic hysteria that Will wondered if there was even anything prepared for him at all.</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>It seemed that Bedelia Du Maurier’s perfect composure had finally broken under the heavy prospect of death. She was suddenly vulnerable, irrevocably weak.</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <em>
    <span>Rejection of weakness . . . Crush it.</span>
  </em>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <em>
    <span>Fly, little bird, </span>
  </em>
  <span>Will thought, turning away from the door and making his way down the stairs as quickly and quietly as he could manage, drawing a knife that had been strapped beneath his sleeve. </span>
  <em>
    <span>Fly away, as far and as fast as you can.</span>
  </em>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>He felt the beast curled in his belly stir and begin to wake, mouth yawning wide in hunger. Ravenous. Insatiable.</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <em>
    <span>This </span>
  </em>
  <span>was what he had been so terrified of the moment he had gone over the edge of the cliff and into the sea.</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <em>
    <span>Fly, Bedelia. </span>
  </em>
  <span>Will threw open the front door, leaping over the path to the side of the house. </span>
  <em>
    <span>I’ll catch you.</span>
  </em>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>And, exhilarated, he began to run.</span>
</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>I love writing Bedelia so much, their conversation is really my favorite thing, especially where I can pull snippets of dialogue from Season 3. What can I say, I love the dramatics XD<br/><br/>Thanks for reading!</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0006"><h2>6. Chapter 6</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>This chapter is em dash hell because I don’t know any other way of building tension apparently<br/><br/>I apologize in advance</p></blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>
  <span>Bedelia Du Maurier could not keep her hands from shaking.</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>They trembled at her sides like tiny doves, fingers clenching and unclenching as she fought to steady herself, as her mind wrestled for control and the strength to wrench her own life back into her hands. Her thoughts rang in her head like music notes, maddening in their condemning harmonies: </span>
  <em>
    <span>Rash! Reckless! Thoughtless! Foolish—</span>
  </em>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>Foolish.</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>Foolish was the word that last came to mind. It seemed that it took but a moment of carelessness to turn the light of a wise man dim, even for one who so usually exercised caution. It was this that defined her downfall—it had been foolish in opening the door, foolish in believing that they could not find her. It had been foolish believing that they were </span>
  <em>
    <span>dead</span>
  </em>
  <span>, foolish to think that, after all that had passed between them, Hannibal would find evading the FBI more important than killing </span>
  <em>
    <span>her</span>
  </em>
  <span>.</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>How had she gotten here? How had she become the sacrifice, the forfeited variable in the world’s violent calculations? If their lives were multi-faceted equations, then they were each constants, lone stars that snagged the edges of the universe. There was no telling where the end would be—the situation dragged on and on and on, much like the universe itself, she supposed, an enigma without a finishing point. </span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>But if she was a star, if she and all the officers of the FBI were ordinary, solitary deities, then Hannibal and Will constituted a supernova. They had come for her in the devil’s glory—or his wrath—in an explosion of darkness and light, and now there was no going back.</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>Bedelia fumbled with the latch of her bedroom window, throwing it open and letting a rush of cold air into the room. She did not know if Will still waited for her outside, or if he had left to find Hannibal already—but either way, time was of the essence here. Hauling open the lowest drawer of her dresser, she pulled up the false bottom, revealing the handgun that laid inside.</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>And the moment she attempted to attach the magazine, the footsteps began.</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <em>
    <span>Will. </span>
  </em>
  <span>Bedelia flew to the window, assessing the drop—though she was on the second story, there were bushes surrounding the house that would be able to soften the impact of the fall. Gun in hand, she took a deep breath, leaning forward over the sill . . .</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>But, to her complete surprise, Will began to walk </span>
  <em>
    <span>away.</span>
  </em>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>Bedelia turned back to the door and frowned. It was strange—did he not know already that she planned to escape? Well, perhaps he did, and he planned to intercept her on solid ground. </span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>It didn’t matter. Either way, she could not afford to waste any more time; Bedelia put one foot on the edge, teetering slightly as she pushed herself up, and, without another moment of hesitation, tilted forward and </span>
  <em>
    <span>leapt.</span>
  </em>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>For a single second, she felt like the light held in the palm of a god, weightless and carried by the wind. For a second, the world was full of white, and she was flying, </span>
  <em>
    <span>flying</span>
  </em>
  <span>—arms outstretched, body suspended in the sky, clouds hanging crooked like a child’s drawings over her head.</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>And then came the fall.</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>Her hands came up above her head, grasping for the endless expanse of gray. The gravity compressed her chest, choking and suffocating her; all the breath tore itself from her lungs as she hurtled down, down and down and down and </span>
  <em>
    <span>down—</span>
  </em>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>Then the impact.</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>Even with the bushes there to break the fall, it shook her to her very core. Bedelia convulsed, wheezing, her body seizing as she gasped for air. She narrowly avoided dropping her gun in the thicket, the weapon her only tether to this world, the only leash keeping her from floating, lost, away.</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <em>
    <span>Get up, </span>
  </em>
  <span>she screamed to herself, but she couldn’t force herself to move. Her skin was marred with scratches, weeping red—</span>
  <em>
    <span>please, please, get up get up get </span>
  </em>
  <span>up—</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>The figure came out of nowhere.</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>One moment Bedelia was struggling to rise, untangling her dress from the thorns, and the next thing she knew she was falling again, a piercing pain tearing up her thigh. </span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>A scream threatened to force its way through her lips as she buckled to her knees. </span>
  <em>
    <span>No no no no </span>
  </em>
  <span>no—</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>She’d come so close. She’d come so close to release, to escape, to evasion, and she could not fail now, not now, </span>
  <em>
    <span>now, </span>
  </em>
  <span>when—</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>Her mouth opened wide as a dark shape moved to block the silhouette of the sun, raising its arms over Bedelia’s head.</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <em>
    <span>No, no </span>
  </em>
  <span>please—</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>And suddenly, all she could see was its shadow.</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>———</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>Will Graham was on fire.</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>His heart pounded in his chest, sending an inferno to race along his blood. It was in his arms, his legs, his hands, his </span>
  <em>
    <span>everything</span>
  </em>
  <span>—his body </span>
  <em>
    <span>burned</span>
  </em>
  <span> as if an invisible iron had been pressed against his skin. </span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>It was not a physical fire, but one that still seared through him with a wicked delight. It consumed him, arching through his veins, igniting in him a fountain of flames that poured down his body and set him alight. It wound around his thoughts like a great smoky serpent, a current that devoured everything in its wake. A conflagration with an eternal appetite, that’s what it was—adrenaline that ran jagged beneath his skin.</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>Yes, the adrenaline: the fire ran under the current, and the current ran under his limbs, and then his body was jerking into motion before his mind could follow, catching Bedelia as she fell in the bushes outside her bedroom window. He could barely tell his movements apart from each other—they all bled into one another as Hannibal’s actions always did, though before today Will had never been able to emulate them.</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>Before today . . . Never before today had his heart raced like this, either, never before. </span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>So what had changed?</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>Bedelia shook beneath him and let out the beginning of a long, drawn-out scream; panicked, Will pressed a hand over her mouth and wrapped the other around the knife buried into her thigh, gripping the handle as hard as he could. He could feel the limb trembling beneath him, and for a moment he could not help but revel in the absolute </span>
  <em>
    <span>power </span>
  </em>
  <span>that he held, the strength in the capture of a solitary quarry and the weight of a single blade.</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>Frantic, Bedelia began to struggle, digging her nails into his arm and wrenching herself from his grasp. The instance became yet another that Will’s body led his mind—and before he truly knew what he was doing, his hand was jerking into motion, shaking and dragging the knife down </span>
  <em>
    <span>into </span>
  </em>
  <span>her blood-soaked flesh. </span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>The blade sank deep.</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>The skin split and the veins burst; Bedelia’s second scream was muffled against his palm. Her eyes rolled up into her head, and suddenly Will’s hands were full of warm, sticky red, as if she was a garden full of roses and he had just crushed each petal between his merciless fingers. </span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>It was no exaggeration—the blood really was </span>
  <em>
    <span>everywhere, </span>
  </em>
  <span>splashing up onto his shirt and splattering his shoes with scarlet. Bedelia’s head lolled against his shoulder, the whites of her eyes shining like bits of pearl set in the flushed pink of their oysters. Will pinned her body up against his and locked an arm around her throat, hauling her clumsily backward.</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>She bled a guilty crimson street all the way to the back of the house.</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>By the time he reached the door, his heart was seizing in his chest. Will felt anything but winded, however—no, no. For </span>
  <em>
    <span>this </span>
  </em>
  <span>was the thrill, the manifestation of his deepest, darkest desires. This body he held, this blood on his hands, this life he controlled—this and this and this, </span>
  <em>
    <span>this </span>
  </em>
  <span>was the incarnation of his nightmares filled with horrified guilt and dreams saturated with bliss.</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>He recalled the vision of himself on the cliff that night, the throbbing ache of the wound in his shoulder, the agony tearing through his cheek—but </span>
  <em>
    <span>oh, </span>
  </em>
  <span>he could not pretend the battle had not been worth it all, worth every single second of the pain. If the future ever mirrored the past, then his act today would arch back and back and back through time, a reflection of the night his life had changed forever.</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>That night, that fall, a rebirth.</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>This day, this kill, a baptism.</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>Will closed his eyes, briefly, and counted to three to steady himself.</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>One.</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>He heard her voice in his head: </span>
  <em>
    <span>You’ve just found religion.</span>
  </em>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>Two.</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <em>
    <span>I’d pack my bags if I were you, Bedelia.</span>
  </em>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>Three.</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <em>
    <span>Meat’s back on the menu.</span>
  </em>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p><span>Back on the menu indeed, he thought as</span> <span>he stumbled up to the doorstep. He must guard this moment, keep it close.</span></p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <em>
    <span>This</span>
  </em>
  <span>, a long breath after near-suffocation. </span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>Just as he reached it, the door swung open, revealing Hannibal standing in the foyer with his sleeves rolled up to his elbow and a butcher’s knife in his hand. Will strode past him to the living room, rolling Bedelia onto the couch. She seemed to have gone unconscious a few seconds earlier.</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>For several minutes, Will did not move, and when he finally turned he saw Hannibal leaning against the wall, studying him with narrowed eyes. “Did you enjoy yourself, Will?”</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>Whatever he had planned to say slipped his mind, and he faltered. “I—I’m sorry—”</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>“How do you feel?” Hannibal did not seem angry with him at all, even if he had just ruined their perfect meal—Will shook again, blood dotting the hardwood floor and drenching his hands. Bedelia was sprawled inelegantly across the cushions, her blond hair spilling over the edge of the seat. “Does your heart race?”</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>Will frowned. Was he imagining it, or did the look on Hannibal’s face seem almost </span>
  <em>
    <span>fond</span>
  </em>
  <span>?</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>But, slowly, he nodded, and decided to play along once more. “I feel as if I’m floating.” The ground was soft, malleable beneath his feet. Perhaps he had sprouted wings, radiant with power: </span>
  <em>
    <span>Set me free and watch me soar.</span>
  </em>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>He sank onto the couch next to Bedelia, and in a moment Hannibal was there, examining both Will and the wound he’d caused. He looked away, trying to calm himself—but was there any calm?</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>“Myths are not created all at once,” Hannibal said, “and yet, there are defining moments. Do you believe you have changed, the way I wished for you to have changed?” </span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <em>
    <span>Do you know yourself?</span>
  </em>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>Will turned the question over in his mind. </span>
  <em>
    <span>Have you changed? </span>
  </em>
  <span>For Hannibal had always wanted him to </span>
  <em>
    <span>see </span>
  </em>
  <span>himself, see what he could become.</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>A couple of weeks ago he might not have been able to accept it. He could still recall it, the hatred that had seethed in the unplumbed cauldron of his mind, the boiling self-pity and disgust. He had wallowed in it, in the nights after the fall. </span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>But now, now that a second life rested in his hands . . .</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>Here laid his gold and their new opportunities.</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>“Are we a myth?” he asked softly, daring a glance at the other man. “Are we a legend?”</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>When Hannibal looked over to him—when he </span>
  <em>
    <span>smiled</span>
  </em>
  <span>—Will knew he had his answer. “You’re becoming, Will.”</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>Will looked down, feeling as if the world was yawning open beneath him, opening into a chasm full of dangerous possibilities and unpredictable chances, an abyss so deep that he narrowly avoided stumbling headfirst into the void. But in the end, he made the decision—or, perhaps, it had been made for him a long time ago. </span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <em>
    <span>You’re becoming.</span>
  </em>
  <span> Two words turned twice more over in his mind.</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>“No,” Will whispered at last, dragging a blood-soaked hand through his hair. “I’ve become.”</span>
</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>So there we go, that’s Chapter 6, also known as me flailing around being unable to write a scene with any sort of action in it! I swear I tried.<br/><br/>Ahhh we’re almost to the end, just two more chapters left</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0007"><h2>7. Chapter 7</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>Okay wow I’ve literally had like 0 motivation to write all month but that’s fine<br/><br/>Um here’s Chapter 7, it is a Very Big Disaster but it’s the best I can do at this time, please enjoy!</p></blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>
  <span>The blade was sharp, cold and ruthless, a weapon without kindness. </span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>The honed edge caught his eye in the radiance of the setting sun, the tender glow of the evening’s arrival winking off of the metal. It was a slender tool, gleaming almost furtively in the light, as if it did not want to draw so much attention—for scalpels belonged in the hands of surgeons with sterile virtues, shielded against malicious intent.</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>Or so he’d thought.</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>Will leaned back against the kitchen table as Hannibal’s clinical instructions wove their way into his mind. </span>
  <em>
    <span>Here’s what you need to know before we begin; it is imperative, Will, that you do it exactly as I tell you. </span>
  </em>
  <span>The words dragged sluggishly over his thoughts. It was not that Will </span>
  <em>
    <span>meant </span>
  </em>
  <span>to be purposely rude or inattentive, but he was tired—and when he was tired everything felt as if it was underwater, torpor weighing on his limbs.</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>Hannibal stepped back with the syringe, his eyes alight with a sinister delight. Bedelia’s hands were folded over her stomach, and her head lolled lifeless against the table. The anesthetic Hannibal had prepared would give them ample time to perform the operation, though in the moment Will found himself suspended in a strange sense of fear—fear that he would slip with the blade or cut too quickly or too far, that he would ruin all of Hannibal’s careful plans with a single, sightless mistake</span>
  <em>
    <span>. </span>
  </em>
  <span>Fear that they would run out of time, that the police would come to interrupt them, that all their dreams for a future would be tarnished like rusted iron over their path of gold.</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>Hannibal’s voice snapped him from his thoughts. “Observe or participate?”</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>The question was casual, but Will still flinched upon hearing it. “Participate,” he said before he could allow himself to hesitate. It was not, he knew, what Bedelia had said.</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>Hannibal smiled at him, then, warmth and devotion and cold satisfaction all playing on two sides of the same coin. If he sensed Will’s apprehension—and there was no way he could not have—he did not acknowledge it. Instead he beckoned Will over to his side, where the wound in Bedelia’s thigh seeped a steady red into the cloth beneath it.</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>The next few minutes—or hours, Will couldn’t tell—passed in a haze; his mind narrowed on the task so much so that time blurred like wind. When he found himself unable to go on, Hannibal was there to guide him—he taught him how to hold the knife, and he taught him where to press, and he covered his hands when they grew unsteady, shaking too violently to make a straight incision. Will could feel his pulse fluttering as if it were a bird’s, beating itself against the cage of Hannibal’s palms.</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>And when it was done, when the limb had been severed and the flesh had been set and the bleeders had been burned, he taught him how to bind the stump where the leg used to be. At some point Hannibal took over, and Will watched as he wrapped the cloth around what was left of the limb almost tenderly.</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>He couldn’t quite explain what happened afterward, but he only knew that between one moment and the next, something  . . . </span>
  <em>
    <span>changed</span>
  </em>
  <span>. It was subtle, yet still bold in its transformation—as he followed Hannibal’s methodical motions with his eyes, there came upon him a sort of peace, a serenity that he had never felt before in his life. There was no other way to describe it—the moment was almost otherworldly in its calm, its quiet, and yet it was not empty either.</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>It took him a while to figure out what it was, but his pulse leapt when he came to the realization: there was no fear. The terror that had choked him steadily for years, cutting off air, cutting off breath, cutting off </span>
  <em>
    <span>relief, </span>
  </em>
  <span>was absent, and not a single ounce of it remained.</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>It was strange. Unease and self-hatred are undoubtedly cold companions in bed, but he had lived with them for years and had grown used to their distressing familiarity. Now, however, it was as if the completion of Bedelia’s downfall had unlocked something within him that lent him the strength to banish the disquiet. Each of the scalpel’s incisions was one that cut his ties from within the chains of trepidation, and he found he couldn’t articulate the way he simply felt . . . more free.</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>No more dread to cage his spirit, no more fear to claim his soul.</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>Perhaps </span>
  <em>
    <span>this </span>
  </em>
  <span>was the last stage of the becoming.</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>“I would like to draw a bath,” Hannibal said once he had finished wrapping the leg. Will jerked himself back to the present, glancing up at him. “I’ve been quite fond of Bedelia for a while, and I don’t want her to eat her last meal shrouded in filth and dishonor.”</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>Will remembered her own words: </span>
  <em>
    <span>It was very kind of you to organize my own Last Supper.</span>
  </em>
  <span> It was an almost amusing expression, as if she pictured herself the saint, the sacrifice, as if the purpose of </span>
  <em>
    <span>her </span>
  </em>
  <span>death was to purge them of their sins. The irony of the phrase was not lost on him—there was nothing holy in becoming the gateway to the freedom of crime. </span>
  <em>
    <span>Their </span>
  </em>
  <span>crimes.</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>He nodded to Hannibal. “Do you want me to come with you?”</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>Hannibal hefted Bedelia carefully and strode toward the door—even with the bulk of the body in his arms, he still managed to stalk with his familiar predatorial grace. “Join me once you set the dining table, if you will.”</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>Will turned his gaze to the cupboard, where the dishes and utensils lay stacked neatly inside. “Of course.” Food from Hannibal’s preparations had been spread all over the kitchen, though he had not begun with the main courses yet—it was truly going to be a feast, not only for Bedelia but for them as well, a celebration of all that had passed and what was yet to come. </span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>When he looked back toward the door, Hannibal had left. In his wake, a different sort of energy lingered in the room—one that mirrored the killer’s presence, settling almost tangible in the tiny space. It toyed with his mind, his thoughts, that comfortable company of phantom hands that pressed against his heart.</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>Will let them twitch his mouth up into a smile that was finally, after so many days, nearly genuine. </span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>He opened the cupboard, taking up the ceramic plates and delicate wine glasses, bitterly cold from where they had sat for long nights so often neglected. There was a fire in his palms that warmed them now, and for a second, he had a vision of those plates splattered with red and the glasses filled with crimson, blood rung from a victim in a balanced end. </span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>In that instant, he could </span>
  <em>
    <span>feel </span>
  </em>
  <span>it, slick and viscous between his fingers. </span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <em>
    <span>Drip, drip, drip.</span>
  </em>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>He gave himself a reassuring grin.</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <em>
    <span>Killer’s hands, killer’s heart.</span>
  </em>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>And just like that, Will stepped into the shadow of the lamb.</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>———</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <em>
    <span>Drip, drip, drip.</span>
  </em>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>The water swirled lazily in the basin as the faucet leaked its final tears, droplets slowing in their fall until ripples ceased to curl along the wilderness of glass. Hannibal leaned Bedelia against the tub, covering her with a towel before he set to the unpleasant task of cutting her mangled dress from her body. In the moment, she truly could have been a corpse, lying eerily still; she did not stir the slightest as he took the washcloth and began to cleanse the cuts and scratches that marred her pale skin.</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>Crimson began to wind its way into the water as Hannibal stirred the washcloth in the basin. Clockwise, counterclockwise, clockwise once more—</span>
  <em>
    <span>swish, swish, swish, </span>
  </em>
  <span>around and around and around—patient, systematic motions, and every time he did so the vessel grew more saturated with blood.</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>Bedelia began to slump to the side, and he tilted her back up, studying her face for any signs of awakening. She should not regain consciousness until about an hour from now, but one could never be completely sure. Hannibal brushed a strand of hair from her face and gave a barely-audible sigh. </span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>She had understood him to an extent, but never truly.</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>Once he’d thought of her as a locked box of sorts, an unconventional means of exchange: into it went his secrets and out of it went hers, and then their deepest mysteries were sealed forever within each other. For a while, they had known each other intimately, though that time had ended the moment he’d left her in Europe, a resolution sealed with a near-tender kiss.</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>As it turned out, Bedelia had only ever been worthy of being eaten.</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>At some point Hannibal went to replace the water, and he heard the door open softly behind him as he drenched the sink with red. He turned to meet Will’s gaze as the basin refilled. “Have you finished?”</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>Will nodded, and there was something bright in his eyes that had not been there before as he sank down next to Bedelia and took up a clean towel. “The table has been set.”</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>They worked in a comfortable silence. Thankfully, her arms had not suffered any damage, and their final task was to bandage the cut on her remaining leg where the bushes’ thorns had dug in. It was a while before Hannibal said, “Your hands have stopped shaking.”</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>Will finished wrapping the leg and stared up at him, almost as if he was surprised Hannibal had taken note of it. It was, perhaps, the most distinguishable change—he’d been shaking since they’d arrived, though Hannibal had not commented on it, and his sudden stillness now was jarring, a slight disturbance in his disposition. “You noticed.”</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <em>
    <span>Of course I have. </span>
  </em>
  <span>“What has changed?”</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>Will shook his head. “Nothing. Everything.” He gave him a slight smile. “It’s strange, I . . . Today, I didn’t despise the thought of killing her.”</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>“And how did you previously think of it?”</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>“You know my early thoughts.” For a moment, Will looked . . . worried for himself, with that shadow of prudence that crossed over his face. “But I’ve been insistent with myself. Killing doesn’t haunt me now the way it used to. Everything’s so . . . quiet.”</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>Hannibal understood. Killing the Dragon together had not erased Will of his morality; it was still very much present, but hidden, </span>
  <em>
    <span>buried</span>
  </em>
  <span>, now, under a man who had gone off a cliff with the devil and had lost a part of himself in the fall. Will could never strive to be </span>
  <em>
    <span>good </span>
  </em>
  <span>again, could never set those boundaries in his mind that had framed his previous righteousness. There was nothing righteous about them now, only half-erased resentment and shades of vice. And yet—Hannibal had begun to see Will start to pull himself away from the self-loathing that came from falling hopelessly in love with sin.</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>Hannibal leaned forward. “Our worlds are complex, but they thrive on a very simple basis. Close your eyes, approach the palace of your mind and mine, and step in—there are thousands and thousands and thousands of doors.”</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>Will obliged, his lashes fluttering. “And what happens when I open them?”</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>“What do you see?”</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>“I see . . .” His mouth twisted. “I see the dark—a massive writhing, coiling thing—and I see you, but your form has been replaced with shadow. It assumes the shape of that—that stag, and I . . .” He opened his eyes. “My palace leads to a dangerous, stunning sort of elegance.”</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>Hannibal nodded. “You and I are very much alike. When I tour the corridors of my own palace, I find beauty in the very things that are, by convention, regarded with the utmost horror. You have found in yourself these very same doors, and I am glad to have been of assistance to you in opening them.”</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>Will began to gather the rest of the bandages, bending to the tiled floor to wipe up the water that had spilled from the basin. Only when Hannibal lifted Bedelia to carry her to the door did he stop and stand, setting the towels on the sink. “I wanted to be good enough for you,” he said finally.</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>Hannibal paused, meeting his eyes in the mirror. There was no mistaking the longing that clouded the blue, and for a moment, he allowed it to overtake his own mind as well. After all, there were no barriers when it came to desire.</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>“Never in my life would I have anticipated meeting a mind such as yours,” he decided to say. “By nature, you glory in violence. Don’t pretend to think that you are doing this solely to please me, or simply to have me stay with you.”</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>Will flushed. “I wanted to see you pleased. And I wanted you to stay.”</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>“Well, then,” Hannibal said. “Trust me when I say that I will not be leaving you in quite some time.”</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>“And what will we be doing after this?” Will asked. “Where will we go?”</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>“We agreed to leave for—”</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>“Yes, I know that,” Will interjected, and Hannibal frowned at the incivility. “But where will we </span>
  <em>
    <span>go</span>
  </em>
  <span>?”</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>He stepped back from the door now to face the other man fully, Bedelia’s head lolling over his shoulder. “We are free. We will go wherever we would like to go, and play our games with care—we’ve won before against God, and now He is on our side.”</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>Will said, uncertainly, “This is the life you wanted for . . . us.”</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>Hannibal narrowed his eyes. </span>
  <em>
    <span>Say it—say it the way you want it to be heard, unless it is too difficult for you to do so, in which case I will say it for you myself. </span>
  </em>
  <span>And when Will did not continue with the sentiment, he did just that. “This is the life we would have had with Abigail.”</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>At that, Will averted his gaze once more, though not before Hannibal noted the shadow of grief that danced across his face. “All your talk of teacups and time seems to have at last come to its culmination,” Will said. “Or perhaps I should say the opposite of a culmination, a settlement. We’ve remade ourselves in our own image, and it isn’t wholly yours. It seems that our teacup has finally drawn itself back together.”</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>The richness of Hannibal’s pride at those words dimmed a shade as Bedelia stirred in his arms. Will blinked, as if he’d forgotten she was there at all. “Do you need me to prepare anything else in the kitchen?” he asked quickly.</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>“I’ve made several side dishes, if you will arrange them how you see fit,” Hannibal said. “And I have a gift for you.”</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>“A gift?”</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>Hannibal had not ever told Will what he had requested Chiyoh to buy for them on her last supply run, and he had not shown him what he had packed in his bag as they pulled themselves farther and farther away from the house on the sea. “It is in the bedroom two doors to the left of the stairwell, if you will go once you are finished with the dishes. Once Bedelia is situated, you can help me with the main course.”</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>Will nodded once more, the red still high in his cheeks. In the moment, though, he looked so steady, secure and unassailable. Fixed in the mountain of his memory and rooted firmly between the hands of fate, risen over the ashes of his virtue.</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>And as he left, Hannibal heard him whisper something akin to “</span>
  <em>
    <span>It’s our chance for our own Last Supper,” </span>
  </em>
  <span>a turn of phrase at once both offensive in its grandiosity and impressive in its offense.</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>And then he was gone.</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>Hannibal shook his head and looked down at the body in his arms, the question still caught on his lips. </span>
  <em>
    <span>Our chance. Our own. Our Last Supper. </span>
  </em>
  <span>He pondered it as he took Bedelia to the bedroom in which he’d laid his supplies.</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>The imagery, to say the very least, was stimulating.</span>
</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>Two references to point out in this chapter:<br/><br/>1. The line “droplets slowing in their fall until ripples ceased to curl along the wilderness of glass” is a reference to Edgar Allan Poe’s “A City in the Sea.”<br/><br/>2. The whole mess of Will and Hannibal’s conversation with the doors in their mind palace was inspired by Mads Mikkelsen, who in an interview made a metaphor about the beauty and horror behind those doors that I found to be quite profound.<br/><br/>The last chapter will be up God knows when! Until then, thank you for reading.</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0008"><h2>8. Chapter 8</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>I am so sorry for the ridiculously slow update, I lost a lot of writing motivation this month and I needed to take some time to think about how to end this story. This final chapter definitely isn’t perfect, but it’s as much as I’m going to be able to delve into the characters’ heads as possible. Bedelia’s final thoughts were so fun to write, as well as Will and Hannibal’s last conversation (yes, I went overboard with it, no, I do not have regrets).<br/><br/>Anyway, please enjoy!</p></blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>
  <span>When Bedelia had been a child, her mother had tried to teach her to play the piano. </span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>She had always found the instrument comforting, shining as it sat in the lamp light of their living room. A lift of the fall on the glossy darkness, and suddenly rows of keys were uncovered like treasures: sleek black on polished white, a soothing binary of stark colors.</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>Her mother had been by no means a virtuoso, but her fingers had been agile, limber as they slid over the keys. Bedelia would often sit motionless, transfixed on the way they glided through the pieces like nimble dancers. She had always paid particular attention to the dialogue between the notes—for any instrument is the most beautiful when one can make it speak, or sing—and the ability of her mother’s hands to hold that conversation, that serenade, that courtship.</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>Of course, while she could spend the entire night admiring the aesthetic, truly learning to </span>
  <em>
    <span>play </span>
  </em>
  <span>the piano was a completely different experience. Try as she might, Bedelia did not possess the skills of her mother—her fingers were heavy and crooked, fumbling with discordant notes and off-beat rhythms, early melodies and late harmonies. She had never been able to play a single piece through to the end quite </span>
  <em>
    <span>right</span>
  </em>
  <span>—it was a part of the reason she had found such great enjoyment from hearing Hannibal play to perfection in Europe. He and her mother shared that same natural artistry, though Hannibal’s hands created far more diverse craft than her mother’s ever had.</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>It was just the same now. When Bedelia woke, lying in the chair in front of her vanity mirror, she was assaulted by the vivid memory of her twisted fingers on the piano keys, tapping out the melody of a song that had never been able to witness a perfect harmony. As she watched her reflection, she felt a strange sort of tingling in her extremities, that same off-treble lament of pain. It sang to her, running its foreign fingers up like a split octave into the space her left leg used to be.</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>The sensation was difficult to describe.</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>Years ago, back when Bedelia had first begun studying psychology, she had realized quite quickly that she could devote her entire life to understanding the nuances of the human brain and not even learn half of its complexities. She found it to be a frustrating thing, one of the world’s quintessential enigmas</span>
  <span>—for </span>
  <span>the brain always stews in memories it does not want and forgets the ones it needs the most. Every now and then it will have its amusements, refusing to let go of the things forever lost to time’s twisted embrace. It wallows in its recollection of suffering, and then the suffering feeds</span>
  <span>—</span>
  <span>it feeds and feeds, until all that the mind has left to carry is a painful souvenir of a moment long since slipped away. Through it all, </span>
  <span>t</span>
  <span>he brain perpetuates a constant agony; it thrives on its own self-destruction, that relentless tide of memories and misery.</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>Bedelia had called it an antinomy as she listened to patient after patient recount tales of grief, madness, trauma . . . It did not make sense, the way their minds had an iron grip on their darkest moments and sometimes even confused them with the light. In all her years, however, Bedelia had never felt the tragedy of the paradox as acutely as she did now—now, as her own mind forced her to recall the knife, the sedatives that Hannibal had injected in order to blur the lines of pain and time. Those were moments that should have been sharp, but now they merged with the dull pain in the place her leg did not exist, and clouded her hidden memories of music.</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>The throb pulsed like a long, held note in the space beneath the bandage on the stump of her thigh. Bedelia cleared her throat, doing her best to ignore the phantom pain, and instead turned her gaze to the doorknob that had begun to turn.</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>Her stomach dropped when Hannibal entered the room with a tray of cosmetics balanced on his arms. Judging by the way her hair curled in soft waves over her shoulders, he had already washed and styled it; it caught the light with the color of rich cream, the essence of a golden summer.</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>She’d been dressed by him, too, though Bedelia tried not to think of the implications that fact held. It was one of the dresses she had bought years ago but had never been comfortable enough to wear, all shimmering black lace with too sheer of a skirt and too low of a neckline. But, she supposed, the choice made sense—barring her unease, Bedelia knew it was an ornate masterpiece, and possibly the most expensive thing she owned. Of course, everything Hannibal readied for this final meal found its home in the land of opulence.</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>She cleared her throat as he set the tray beside her on the table. Diamonds dangled from her ears, sparkling where they met the light, and a chain of gold glinted from its place around her neck. </span>
  <em>
    <span>Too much, </span>
  </em>
  <span>Bedelia thought, feeling a sudden surge of anger. </span>
  <em>
    <span>Too, too much. How dare he have the audacity to dress me up and fashion me like a doll.</span>
  </em>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>“Has Mr. Graham left?” she asked, resisting the urge to pluck off the earrings one by one and hurl the necklace at Hannibal’s feet.</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>She was greeted with a mild answer: “Will is downstairs, preparing dinner for us.”</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>Bedelia swallowed; so then it was true. “Getting me all dressed up to eat myself,” she said, looking down at her thigh (or the lack of it) and toying with the edges of that obnoxious white gauze.</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>“I assumed that you wanted to be clean,” Hannibal said. “It is, after all, your Last Supper—your chance to leave your life in a resignation both classic and refined.” He said the words mockingly, as if it were a little surviving joke between two acquaintances that had long since drifted apart.</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>Bedelia hummed, feeling her hands clench into fists at her sides as his fingers teetered between the makeup brushes like butterflies among a field of flowers. “I would not call Christ </span>
  <em>
    <span>classic and refined.</span>
  </em>
  <span>”</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>“Then I would not refer to myself as Christ,” Hannibal said, and just like that, the metaphor was unraveled. He reached for a tube containing a shade of porcelain much too pale for her skin, selecting from the row of brushes that lay beside it seemingly at random.</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>“Is this how it ends, then?” said Bedelia, wanting to pluck the foundation from his hands. He held these tools to prepare her for a night of hideous beauty—for Hannibal had an artist’s taste and an artist’s touch, but when it came to this, he was nothing more than a clumsy dilettante parading as an expert.</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>“An end,” Hannibal mused, “or a beginning?”</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>“Stop,” Bedelia said, and he raised an eyebrow at her, balancing the fine-bristled brush in his palm. “If what you want is for my dignity to be preserved, then let me do this for myself. Your inexperience in this field is quite . . . discernable.” She didn’t want him touching her any more than he already had, nor did she want to take part in their usual game of twisted words and schemes. Not when she could feel the fatigue weighing heavy behind the lids of her eyes, waiting with its warped caress to lull her into the realm of sleep.</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>Hannibal’s lips thinned at her words, but he obliged. Minutes later, Bedelia had applied the base layers to her face and was leaning forward, squinting at her reflection through hazy vision. The sedative, it seemed, was still at work—the more she focused on her eyes the more they seemed to blur, sliding in and out of focus like a deficient camera lens. She did her best to steady her hands all the same, darkening her lashes and spreading gentle shadow over the lids.</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>Bedelia finished by marking her lips with a glossy pink and turned to Hannibal, who had been studying her with a quizzical expression. “Any finishing touches?” she asked, leaning back in the chair. The world lurched once before falling into a hypnotic sway.</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>“I believe the final piece is quite captivating as it is,” Hannibal said appreciatively. “No more requests of your own, I suppose?”</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>She blinked up at him warily, feeling as if she was swimming in a thick, black syrup—fingers stuck to fingers and toes stuck to toes, head twisting slowly in the cloying darkness. “Hmm? No, I suppose not.”</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>“My thanks to you, then, Bedelia.” Hannibal produced a needle from beneath his sleeve and slipped it easily into her arm, sending her vision tunneling once again. “You’ve been an excellent partner, and I trust that you will enjoy dinner when it comes.”</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>“I . . .” Bedelia tried to give a last voice to the words that strayed further and further from her lips, and failed. Instead, the music returned, rising up once again in her memory with lilting notes and faded fingers and her mother’s quiet encouragement.</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <em>
    <span>The wrong notes still make songs, but they are never the same as the old.</span>
  </em>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <em>
    <span>You’ve lost something in the new melody, Bedelia. But perhaps that is for the better—there’s more to be discovered with the absence in the original . . . </span>
  </em>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <em>
    <span>Tear holes in the pieces and rend them apart. You’re building riddles and layers, stories in the off-beat and the dissonance. </span>
  </em>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <em>
    <span>Don’t only practice your art, but force your way into its secrets.</span>
  </em>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>Even as a child, the last statement had resonated with her—</span>
  <em>
    <span>Force your way into its secrets. </span>
  </em>
  <span>For even in song (or the absence of a proper one), composers had their puzzles fit between the notes, threads of story to be caught and unraveled and turned into something new.</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>There were secrets now, too, lying beneath the surface of the end of her life: secrets in the empty space beneath her hip, in the leg that surely laid steaming on the dining table. Secrets in the double meaning of Hannibal’s words, in Will’s vivid, violent expressions; secrets locked away within the paradox of the human brain, and the way that some people saw screams as songs and blood as paint and death as the greatest canvas for masterpiece. There were secrets in the moral tug-of-war and truth behind the memories that the mind refused to be let go, no matter how much time had passed since or how much pain they caused.</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>And then there were secrets in crime. </span>
  <em>
    <span>Their </span>
  </em>
  <span>crime. Scattered in passionate corruption, found beyond right and wrong and Heaven and Hell or any other place mortals could dream of. Killing was an art, and she </span>
  <em>
    <span>was </span>
  </em>
  <span>the masterpiece. They would savor her, undoubtedly—for she was the great triumph of two men who’d changed themselves into gods.</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>At last, there was nothing left in her head that made sense for her to say. But Bedelia let it spill from her mouth anyway—seven words captured in the weeping croon of her lost leg, the key of that final, mournful chord.</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>“Unlawful art makes music of us all.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  
</p>
<p>
  <span>She smiled sleepily at Hannibal before the piano’s song continued, and the dark crept in to whisk her away.</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>———</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>Even several hours after the fight, Will’s excitement had not faded.</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>It was strange, a constant presence in him now, rising in his gut at long last unobstructed by fear. There was a hole, an absence, where the apprehension used to lie, and it should have made him hollow—for that was what psychopaths were, weren’t they, people with just enough of their minds twisted and their hearts stolen that they grew wrong. They grew wrong, and turned to vessels for chaos and for wicked things—deeds best left to be done alone in the dark. Part of them laid silent and empty, devoid of compassion and empathy . . . but Will was not such a shell. Instead of that desolation, power had come to fill his own well—a sort of power that called for such unboundedness, such </span>
  <em>
    <span>freedom</span>
  </em>
  <span>, that it set his mind on fire and poured like molten honey through his skin.</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>He stopped at the second door to the left of the stairwell, anticipation writhing in his stomach. </span>
  <em>
    <span>I have a gift for you. </span>
  </em>
  <span>What would Hannibal have brought for him, or retrieved from Bedelia’s home? A weapon, perhaps, a firearm or a blade? But that would be too simple of a gesture, too outright and too . . . material. </span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <em>
    <span>Enough, </span>
  </em>
  <span>he told himself. There was no use in pondering possibilities and distracting himself with trivial affairs.</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>And so without further ado, Will reached out, and he turned the knob.</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>The door fell open to reveal a small, tidy bedroom sparsely furnished with a desk and a bed. The former was bare but for a stack of books, but the latter . . .</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>On the bed, sitting atop the pristine sheets, was a neatly-folded suit.</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>Will stopped mid-step—whatever it was that he had been expecting, it certainly wasn’t </span>
  <em>
    <span>this. </span>
  </em>
  <span>The costume was beautiful, a well-pressed three-piece with smooth fabric dyed a rich shade of navy blue. It was the kind of blue that spoke of confidence, the swift and steady resolve of truth; it was the deep blue of a winter sky just an hour before midnight, touched already with a pitch darkness. The refinement was almost tangible—there was strength in that color, strength in the style, strength in the silence and suavity and sophistication.</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>And there was a note.</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>Will picked up the piece of paper that laid beside the suit, unfolding it to reveal Hannibal’s lovely sweeping penmanship.</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <em>
    <span>It took time to find a suit in this shade, but you could have nothing less. </span>
  </em>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <em>
    <span>Many things are forgotten when midnight descends, swept up in the rain-washed darkness. What trails behind it is a long trance of shadowed dreams and nightmares</span>
  </em>
  <span>—</span>
  <em>
    <span>think, Will, you know it well. If this marks the hour before the darkest moment, then which will it be today? The memory of the dream, or the recollection of the nightmare?</span>
  </em>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>And, when he flipped it over:</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <em>
    <span>This blue complements your eyes.</span>
  </em>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>Will stared at the note, and turned his gaze back to the suit—a symbol of time and fortitude, tinged with tender scrutiny and sentiment. </span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <em>
    <span>This blue complements your eyes.</span>
  </em>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>Later as he washed and dressed, he wondered what Hannibal had decided to wear to the dinner himself. Would they clothe themselves in the same dark palette, feast as killers that stalked their supper and deities that governed the night?</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <em>
    <span>Midnight, the hour before the darkest moment. Which will it be today?</span>
  </em>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>Will descended the stairs, smoothing down his tie as he went.</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <em>
    <span>Which will it be today?</span>
  </em>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>He entered the dining room to see all of the dishes arrayed beautifully on the table—all of them, that was, except for the main course, which still sat cooking in the kitchen. The aroma laid heavy in the air, plates of thick sauces and creamy delicacies, sweet greens and glasses waiting to be filled with wine. Hannibal glanced up at him as he lowered an unconscious Bedelia into a heavy chair, took in the suit, and smiled.</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>Will’s heart filled.</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <em>
    <span>Sometimes, Hannibal, </span>
  </em>
  <span>he thought as he laid his eyes upon the fine art displayed before him.</span>
  <em>
    <span> Sometimes, dreams and nightmares are the same.</span>
  </em>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>———</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>He waited in the kitchen as he had been told. The leg was nearly finished; he could smell the spices wafting from the oven, tangy and sweet. Hannibal had baked the limb in clay—</span>
  <em>
    <span>a technique, Will, that I have employed with countless other meals.</span>
  </em>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>Will moved to clear up some of the utensils they had used to cook, setting them carefully in the sink. He wondered how many others had come before Bedelia—how many </span>
  <em>
    <span>countless other meals</span>
  </em>
  <span>, how many feasts and guests and souls in severed limbs, murder at the heart of supper. </span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>A moment later, the door swung open, and Hannibal strode into the kitchen. He wore something akin to a tuxedo—the sleek black jacket was draped on one arm, the tie a splash of red against the clean white of his shirt. Will blinked; for a moment, it looked like a column of blood.</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>He cleared his throat. “Thank you for the suit, it’s lovely.” Lovely indeed—putting it on had felt like slipping into the night, encasing himself in smooth satin darkness. Will thought that it must have been challenging to stain synthetic fabrics with color that looked so much like it belonged to the darker parts of the world, those places of secret meant to lie untouched by men. </span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>“Isn’t it?” Hannibal asked, dragging Will’s gaze back up to his face. “The color was quite difficult to obtain, but it was not outside Chiyoh’s capabilities.” </span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>Of course—Chiyoh. “You planned ahead,” said Will.</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>“I always do.” Hannibal glanced up at the clock. “It is almost time—you did beautifully today, Will. The settlement you anticipated has arrived, and you already hold the weight of one death, heavy under Heaven’s burden. Tonight, you bear the skies with grace.”</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>“Grace,” Will repeated, and shook his head. </span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>A slight pause. “Did I misstep?” Hannibal asked.</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>“No. I only . . .” He swallowed, trying to phrase his thoughts. “I . . . I’m not ashamed of this, but I can’t call it </span>
  <em>
    <span>grace</span>
  </em>
  <span>. Morality . . . it </span>
  <em>
    <span>splinters </span>
  </em>
  <span>beneath my skin. The murders stretch on and on and on, and my fear is no longer my own. There’s a chorus of mirth in my blood where there used to be misery, but it’s trapped in my veins—I feel like a god forced to endure its exile.”</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>“Who is to exile you if you are a god?” Hannibal asked, his voice quiet. “Who is to bind you, to end you, to unwork you?”</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>“Gods thrive on humanity,” Will said. “They feed off of faith, and in our case we feed off of death—or perhaps I should say justice.”</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>“Death does not encompass who we are.”</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>“No, it doesn’t.”</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>His mind spun—who </span>
  <em>
    <span>was </span>
  </em>
  <span>he now, truly? Would he become defined by the killing or the civility behind it? It was almost simple: rudeness was intolerable, and therefore it would be eradicated. If they were gods, then they instilled fear in the hearts of men, fear and respect and the fickle promise to their worshippers that their faith would not hurt them.</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>“Look at what we’ve done, Will,” Hannibal said softly, in a way that seized his heart. “Look at what we’ve done, and you will know how it feels to be holy. You will have learned how to give your mind a name that fits, even if it cannot be pronounced—we have remade and remade ourselves, and dreams are no longer impossible things.”</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>“It’s not just the shaking hands,” Will said, closing his eyes and letting the words flow from his mouth like a river. “It’s not just the sweat or the stomachaches or the sweetness of the fevers, it’s not just the blood on my mouth or the stars I see in killers’ eyes. There is more to godhood than feeling holy.” </span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <em>
    <span>This is who we are after the body and the cliff and the sea, </span>
  </em>
  <span>he wanted to say, </span>
  <em>
    <span>after the water and the fire and the light, the unfathomable expanse of rebirth. The ocean changed me, but it was your mirror—a restless reflection of your soul. </span>
  </em>
  <span>“I used to be afraid of devouring my grief until I understood the beauty of what we do, and what our hands can make.” Hannibal blinked at him, and Will hesitated, testing the following words on his lips before he spoke them. “You . . . you’ve made me.”</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>The statement, even to him, sounded like a confession—as much of a confession as he could make, that is, and more of one than he had ever made before. He’d bared his soul to Hannibal Lecter too many times in the past, and now here they were, standing in the kitchen of their crucial victim at the crossroads of their future.</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>“You are an artist, Will,” Hannibal said. “You’ve touched the divine, and we are each other’s creation. You have painted my heart, and in return I’ve spun your thoughts to tapestries.”</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <em>
    <span>Our souls are entwined, do you remember? </span>
  </em>
  <span>Will thought. It was all the reason that Hannibal was right—there came a sort of pride with the other man’s words, a pride that began with a slight ache in his chest and soon spread throughout his body, slow and sweet. His cheeks heated with it, and it ran electric through his veins, searing against them and setting them alight.</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>Only Hannibal could thrust his words into Will’s heart and make him bleed ichor.</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>Briefly, he revisited that night at the sea for what felt like the thousandth time. Now, however, it was different; he recalled joy instead of devastation, adrenaline instead of fear. All their talk of rebirth, rebirth—in the end, the man had risen to be a deity, and the lamb had ascended to become a wolf.</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <em>
    <span>It really does look black in the moonlight.</span>
  </em>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>How strange it was to think of a time that he did not have the ability to hold light in his hands and bleed shining gold.</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <em>
    <span>See . . .</span>
  </em>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>Hannibal passed a hand over Will’s shirt to straighten his tie, murmuring something about how well he looked in blue. </span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <em>
    <span>This is all I ever wanted for you, Will.</span>
  </em>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>He flushed, and Hannibal stepped toward the oven, beckoning to him in a sweeping gesture more graceful than a line of poetry.</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <em>
    <span>For both of us.</span>
  </em>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>Blood on his hands, the hands of a god. He swayed, feeling the water rise to his knees, the cold, churning bite of the tide; salt on his skin and agony on his lips, laughter bubbling in his throat. This was the transformation the ocean had wrought—this was the aftermath of his becoming, the words that beat in time with his heart: </span>
  <em>
    <span>sea change, sea change, sea change.</span>
  </em>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>At long last, Will took Hannibal’s offered hand.</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <em>
    <span>“It’s beautiful.”</span>
  </em>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>And together, they stepped out of the water and into the sky.</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>———</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>In another world, a pianoforte sat in a room of an old home, notes ringing in a melody both haunting and exquisite.</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>In another world, a child sat at the keys, pouring her heart into the song.</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>In another world, things were quiet, and gentle, and the tune of their lives did not falter, the lilt and the rhythm were not wrong.</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>In another world, she had found a semblance of happiness, tucked away inside her musicianship.</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>In another world, this was the only definition of art there ever was.</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>In another world, she was safe.</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>———</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>This was not that world.</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>———</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>The silence woke her first.</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>In the dining room, the table had been set for three. Stacked in front of her were dozens and dozens of dishes whose scents mixed in their own harmony, plates and flowers and dimly-lit candles, and, of course, the magnificent centerpiece—the tender piquant roast adorned with seasoning and spice, wrapped like a prize in green ti leaves.</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>In any other situation, the feast laid before her would be enough to make anyone salivate. When Bedelia looked down at the knife beside the platter and the gold of the oyster fork on her plate, however, the only feeling that crept up her throat was revulsion.</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>The stump of her thigh ached. With the leg this close, it was as if the phantom limb could sense it, see past a veil to a long-lost friend—a friend as much a part of it as it was of them. But it did not sing now; no, as Bedelia felt the terror creep over her body like a chill, the silence—a horrible, drawn-out empty silence—reigned.</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>She could not see them in the kitchen, but she could sense them there as surely as the prey senses the presence of the predator, the victim the arrival of the killer. She held no power here, </span>
  <em>
    <span>none, </span>
  </em>
  <span>and could only wait as they stretched the inevitability of her death. On the grand scheme of odds and chances, her options had whittled down to zero.</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>Bedelia du Maurier had played the game, and she had lost.</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>The quiet strained on and on and on.</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>At last, just as her heart pounded so loudly that it nearly cut through the haze of her sedatives, she heard a shuffle from the kitchen.</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>She tensed. </span>
  <em>
    <span>They’re coming.</span>
  </em>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>Bedelia straightened, her mind whirling through the smoke. She had never given much thought as to how she would die—she hadn’t ever found a reason to </span>
  <em>
    <span>care</span>
  </em>
  <span>—but now, she knew the fear. Now, as the sapid steam poured off of the leg at the center of the table, invading her nose, her mouth, spreading through her senses and gagging her until she could not breathe, she knew. She knew what it felt like to truly be </span>
  <em>
    <span>afraid.</span>
  </em>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>Gradually, the weight of the silence lifted from her chest, until . . .</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>Far off she could hear the chime of silver, like the ringing of distant bells. The sound toed the line between delusion and reality—were they gathering silverware or weapons, or was she imagining it all?</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>At this point, could she even bring herself to care?</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>The silence had come from nothing, and now it ended, just as it always did, in music. </span>
  <em>
    <span>Here is the end, </span>
  </em>
  <span>those silver bells sang. </span>
  <em>
    <span>Here is the end, and you are their reckoning.</span>
  </em>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>Slowly, flexing her fingers, Bedelia reached for the oyster fork that lay such like an offering on her plate. The cool metal kissed her skin as she returned her hands to her lap; they fluttered with a last, futile attempt to deny her defeat.</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>And yet still, the bells whispered their ominous promises in her ear: </span>
  <em>
    <span>on comes the funeral march. </span>
  </em>
  <span>The world was hazy through the sedatives, and Bedelia dug the tip of the fork into her palm, trying to keep herself awake.</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <em>
    <span>Here is the end. </span>
  </em>
  <span>The bells grew louder, punctuated now and then by steady footsteps. </span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <em>
    <span>No more, </span>
  </em>
  <span>she thought, almost hysterically. She realized, belatedly, the sheer extent of her terror, sharp as the drop off a cliff into the roiling Atlantic. </span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>Bitter. Acrid.</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <em>
    <span>It’ll ruin the taste of the meat. </span>
  </em>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>God, if she cared.</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <em>
    <span>Here is the end, here is the end. </span>
  </em>
  <span>Her fingers clenched, warming the metal, her heart leaping into her throat.</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <em>
    <span>Here is the end,</span>
  </em>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <em>
    <span>Here is the end—</span>
  </em>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>Bedelia swallowed, the bells reached their peak, suddenly the door was swinging open and—</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <em>
    <span>Here is the end.</span>
  </em>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>They smiled.</span>
</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>If you’re here, then congratulations, you made it through all the pretentious dialogue to the end!<br/><br/>Just a few final thoughts to wrap this all up, my original goal for this story was to bridge the last scene in which we saw Will and Hannibal onscreen and the scene after the end credits with Bedelia. I wasn’t planning to go further, and thus I started it with the fall and ended it with where the show cut off.<br/><br/>Even with the end of Season 3, there was so much more to explore with Will’s character and his and Hannibal’s relationship—where does he go from here? Has he finally embraced the idea of killing? What does Hannibal have in store for the both of them, and how does Bedelia fit in all of this? A lot of my interpretation was very straightforward, and I really just wanted to illustrate the arc of Will’s character from the “sea change” to his (tentative) acceptance of who he was. There’s a lot to be said about this, and in my story he definitely wavered between feelings of fear and doubt and excitement and passion, but Hannibal ultimately led him through to the other side. While I think there are many things I could have done better, I hope the least I could do was do their characters justice.<br/><br/>One reference to point out is in Bedelia’s section with the line “Don’t only practice your art, but force your way into its secrets.” This was taken from a quote from the composer Beethoven: “Don’t only practice your art, but force your way into its secrets, for it and knowledge can raise men to the divine.” It’s a genuinely beautiful line, and it felt fitting to insert for my little addition of Bedelia’s connection to music.<br/><br/>Just one other instance where I diverged from canon: I am aware that according to Bryan Fuller Will and Hannibal pit-roasted the leg, but I did some googling and it turns out that it can literally take up to twelve hours, which. Uh. I couldn’t find a way to fit the time frame (or the space? The materials? The pit?) into the context of this story, so I just had them bake the leg in clay in the way that Hannibal did with Abel Gideon (it’s a <i>tad</i> bit more realistic).<br/><br/>Yes, Hannibal does a lot of sappy pining in this, I love the murder husbands.<br/><br/>Thank you very much for reading!</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
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